Enough Already: First Steps (Premium)

On Tuesday morning, I did what I do every morning: I made a cup of espresso I barely even enjoy anymore and sat down in the sunroom to read the news before walking the dog. This typically involves scanning the front page and most popular sections of The New York Times, the tech headlines in Google News, my Google discovery news feed, and, if there’s enough time, the news feed in Brave, in that order.

Each of these mobile apps is unique in its own way, but each suffers from the same problem: the articles they display are riddled with ads. Most are web-based, and if you’ve visited the web on mobile lately, where ad blockers are rare, especially inside of mobile apps, you have surely noticed how ads have multiplied and become far more annoying in recent months.

But Tuesday was special, in the wrong way. On Tuesday, I encountered something I had never seen before: an article in which there was a tall and large auto-playing video ad that could not be paused in between every single paragraph of text. And since many paragraphs were short or even just a single sentence, that meant I couldn’t avoid them at all. In fact, I could always see two of them at once onscreen. Unbelievable.

Like many of you, I’ve put up with the proliferation of ads on mobile because what else could I do? I’ve grumbled to myself as I’ve positioned what I’m reading in an app such that whatever animated or video ad is playing is offscreen, and when I need to scroll to the next bit of text, I try to scroll past the ad so that it’s behind the top of the screen. What I encountered on Tuesday was obviously designed to prevent that behavior and, more important, trigger an inadvertent ad click, a bogus form of engagement that would benefit the underlying sight in some infinitesimally small way.

I snapped.

The result was Enough with the F#*!ing Ads (Premium), which expanded the discussion to include paid services that also display ads and how all of Big Tech is rallying around this model, and a call to readers for advice on what, if anything, I could do to put a stop to this stupidity. And I wrote that, as I write this now, knowing full well that my career has long been supported by web-based ads. Well, sort of: over time, ads plummeted in value, which explains why all websites now display so many of them. They just don’t pay the bills anymore. This explains our Premium subscription, which removes most ads from the site, provides access to unique content like this, and creates, I think, a more honest relationship between the content creator (me) and readers.

I guess my point is that I’m aware that what I’m doing here may seem hypocritical or ironic, depending on your viewpoint. But the truth is, there’s no such thing as a writer or other content creator who wants ads, let alone the insane jumble of ads you see these days. We just want to be paid for what we do for a living. You know, like everyone else. We’re victims of this system too, ju...