It really is dead, isn't it?

My less tech savy younger family members have learned to completely ignore ads, wait for the skip button and effectively avoid all the false skip buttons on account of playing mobile games with ads since they were babies. Advertisers have perfected the human brain of people who rawdog the internet to be incapable of retaining any information from any ad they see and finding skip buttons wherever they may be.

From my personal observational account, i think I've only seen boomers and some older millennials ever interacting with ads. A gen alpha's brain wouldn't even remember an ad they just saw. They have perfected filtering them.

I still have an itch from last time

Yep, they brought it upon themselves, I still remember as a kid falling for a "you are the visitor number 1 million" and getting a virus; and now we have porn and cults advertising on youtube, nothing changed.

An AI feature actually useful for consumers? Corporate overloards say no thx, let’s instead fill the net with more AI-generated SEO bullshit

Discord is the new snapchat

I'm fine with ads when they don't take up half my screen or try and shift the page to to trick me into clicking on them, should a stuck with sidebar adds.

The honest answer are general fees like they are used for public broadcasters. It’s not a perfect system either and it requires significant effort to keep things neutral, but overall it seems to have the best results if you compare the quality of the outcome.

If your website is a business, you need to have a business model. If your business model isn't sustainable, because it relies on not annoying visitors too much, maybe look for a better one.

Btw, most newspages have adapted some 10 years ago already, showing the important news for free and additional details with paid account. A lot have the balance off tho.

News sites are in need of a paradigm shift.

I think we might get to a system where summaries of news are free, but indepth articles and videos are paid.

Oh and I believe that news sites should scrap subscription only models, I should be able to pay 1-2EUR for a single article that I want to read, with no risk of the payment being a subscription.

Obviously subscriptions models should still be an alternative if the users want it.

Subscription models. Some sites even combine some free articles with it, so that anyone can look into their works, but not necessarily everything. If it fits you, you get a subscription. Sort of the same way people would pay for their daily newspaper.

It can be argued that "news" should be free, and there are some news site that are basically picking up AP/AFP/whatever and repost these, but actual journalism do requires work.

Depends, some pages don't actually load the full content. Removing the paywall pop-up doesn't really work then.

Sometimes the reading mode bypasses paywalls and popups.

Also make sure to block "annoyances" in uBlock.

For the rest, I'm using the Nuke Anything extension.

That sounds like a lot of work. On sites where that work (which is not all of them, some are made by competent people), firefox "reading mode" just do the job.

I used to do that but it turns out ublock has a option for that!! When u click on the ublock plugin there is a thunder symbol option which u can use to delete any element on the page. 🙃

Edit: grammer mistake

I completely get your point, and to an extent I agree, but I do think there's still an argument to be made.

For instance, if a theme park was charging an ungodly amount for admission, or maybe, say, charged you on a per-ride basis after you paid admission, slowly adding more and more charges to every activity until half your time was spent just handing over the money to do things, if everyone were to stop going in, the theme park would close down, because they did something that turned users away.

Websites have continually added more and more ads, to the point that reading a news article feels like reading 50% ads, and 50% content. If they never see any pushback, then they'll just keep heaping on more and more ads until it's physically impossible to cram any more in.

I feel like this is less of a dunk on the site by not using it in that moment, and more a justifiable way to show that you won't tolerate the rapidly enshittified landscape of digital advertising, and so these sites will never even have a chance of getting your business in the future.

If something like this happens enough, advertisers might start finding alternative ways to fund their content, (i.e. donation model, subscription, limited free articles then paywall) or ad networks might actually engage with user demands and make their systems less intrusive, or more private. (which can be seen to some degree with, for instance, Mozilla's acquisition of Anonym)

Even citing Google's own research, 63% of users use ad blockers because of too many ads, and 48% use it because of annoying ads. The majority of these sites that instantly hit you with a block are often using highly intrusive ads that keep popping up, getting in the way, and taking up way too much space. The exact thing we know makes users not want to come back. It's their fault users don't want to see their deliberately maliciously placed ads.

A lot of users (myself most definitely included) use ad blockers primarily for privacy reasons. Ad networks bundle massive amounts of surveillance technology with their ads, which isn't just intrusive, but it also slows down every single site you go to, across the entire internet. Refusing that practice increases the chance that sites more broadly could shift to more privacy-focused advertising methods.

Google recommends to "Treat your visitors with respect," but these sites that just instantly slap up an ad blocker removal request before you've even seen the content don't actually respect you, they just hope you're willing to sacrifice your privacy, and overwhelm yourself with ads, to see content you don't even know anything about yet. Why should I watch your ads and give up my privacy if you haven't given me good reason to even care about your content yet?

This is why sites with soft paywalls, those that say you have "x number of free articles remaining," or those that say "you've read x articles this month, would you consider supporting us?" get a higher rate of users disabling adblockers or paying than those that just slap these popups in your face the moment you open the site.

Yes and no. Similar with apps, you can say "well if you're not paying/seeing adds then we lose nothing by you not visiting", but, depending on their growth stage, it's very hard to grow and get investors without a sizable audience.

Say you're a startup. If you have 10k people and you ignore ad blockers and people who don't play subscriptions. Then you start preventing people with ad blockers and no subscriptions from your platform and it drops to 1k... You lose investment pulling power.

The effect is amplified, or much worse, if you actually require user generated content as well

We want them gone. The market goes where the users use it. The Internet did not have the advertising presence it does now when it was conceived. Saying they want us gone means they are the only game in town. They aren't. They are too big for their britches and need to realize the users dictate the usage.

Peak monetisation. Don't let them even see the article [copied from another website and run through ChatGPT] until they fork over the entrance fee.