Consider

I absolutely love modern internet. Who doesn't like being shoved seventeen hundred ads per second after accepting the cookies and subscribing to the newsletter in every single website they visit? I certainly do. So in this blogpost, I would like to talk about how ads changed my LIFE for the better! You won't BELIEVE how! Read more to find out!

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It's a weird thing to say perhaps, but I miss the old ads. They used to be tiny rectan...

It's a weird thing to say perhaps, but I miss the old ads. They used to be tiny rectangles in the corners of websites that you could easily ignore. They were annoying and I was happier without, sure; but I don't remember being overwhelmed with ads until recently. Now popups, toasts, snackbars, video ads with autoplay, sponsorships mid-video, unskippable, minute-long... It's too much. Unbearable, even.

Then the idea of premium accounts started. Pay some, so you don't get any ads. But why would anyone pay money to remove ads in free content, if they are unobtrusive anyways?

Someone, somewhere had a very bad idea. And here we are.

I can't not complain about YouTube if the topic is advertisements. I do not support the way the platform is handled, but that's another story. It is the streaming platform many of us grew up with. It was free. It has always been free. For a platform that has so much traffic such as YouTube, I can understand why ads are essential. It is not free to host so many videos. As much as it may seem like it, I am not against the notion of ads.

The five second ads. You click on a video, pretend to watch it for five seconds, and then enjoy your clickbait video about how spreading onion paste at the bottom of your feet cured pnemonia for the next twenty minutes. That's how I remember the platform to be. Nowadays I can't finish a ten-minute video without ten unskippable ads. What happened?

As if it's not enough, I also get to watch a sponsored segment about a cash-grab mobile game or a shady-looking investment website. The segment is usually blatantly placed in the middle of other product placements by the content creator that is wearing their own merch.

That same content creator has to put up with these sponsorships and merch, because YouTube is very unstable when it comes to that. You swear once, you get demonetized; while YouTube keeps distributing inappropriate ads without moderation. They need this kind of extra income just in case because you never know what the platform's automated AI tools that are impossible to appeal to might tell about you.

It happens more often than the platform wants to admit. A creator named Mumbo Jumbo had 400 of his videos copyright claimed in an hour. One of the instrument samples in a song that he bought legal right to use in his videos, was copyrighted itself. After a legal battle, he had to manually crop the intro of his videos out for the 400 affected videos, then appeal individually to reclaim monetization.

So it really bothers me that we target our hate towards the creator, when their income relies on such unpredictable rules. Instead, I just direct my hatred towards the decisionmakers at YouTube HQ for having a double standard for their ads. Not only are they obtrusive, but also inappropriate for some audiences.

That's not an issue that's specific to YouTube. The ad provider for countless websites is Google. They track your movement across the internet, likely match it with the personal data they bought from third parties or directly collected themselves, make a profile out of you, so that they can show the ads that might most interest you. You googled about lawnmowers once? Enjoy the premium lawnmower deals for the foreseeable future.

I'm afraid Google knows more about me than I do about myself. I'm not sure how I feel about targeted ads, because I don't even remember the last time I clicked on an ad despite Google's best efforts. The ads have been so common that my brain learned to ignore them. I can immediately spot the microscopic X that closes the ad before my brain acknowledges I have seen the ad. So I genuinely don't understand how it is profitable for the company to adversite themselves that way. Does anyone really click on them?

We are close to the dead internet especially with the rise of AI-generated content. I don't have an estimate on what percentage of the online content I see in the form of comments or blogposts is generated by our OpenAI overlords, but one thing is true: most traffic online might be bots. Given this, will an ad ever be clicked? I can only imagine this heavily decreases the price of posting an ad online since click-to-view ratio will get lower and lower over time. Wouldn't that encourage buying more ads since it's cheaper per view?

Following that logic, ads aren't going anywhere. If anything, I'm afraif that they will get more and more creative where they can display them. Popups, midrolls, notifications on your fridge, CAPTCHA on your car screen, spotlight in the sky like Batman, ... Human mind is creative when it comes to profit. Sony holds a patent with number US8246454B2 which is titled "system for converting television commercials into interactive networked video games." While I am grateful to them for owning this patent without ever using it, it scares me that someone even came up with the idea as if 2 hour ad breaks between 10 minutes of content was not enough.

Oh yeah, about Google knowing more about me than myself. Cookies. Cookies everywhere. It's impossible for me to make up my mind about whether the cookie banner was a good idea or not. On the one hand, it is good to know which cookies a website uses in the background. On the other, it's all the same cookie collectors and third parties; it gives me fatigue having to manually deselect all just to reed a cookie recipe. I can't even embed a YouTube video on this blog without having to have that cookie banner. Why does an embedded video need so many cookies?

It's true. If the product is free, we are the product.

I don't know. I just hate it. I hate to click 75 buttons just to see if I like the content at all. The internet is ruined enough, but they also want to take away the limited privacy we have online thanks to the proposed data act in the European Union. Yay.

The post doesn't really have an objective beyond complaining what has become of the internet. I needed to rant a little bit. Thank you for joining me. Let's hope the ads and monetization stuff ruin the internet so much that we start going out to meet each other again. Face to face this time, not on Facebook.

With that being said, thanks to SeptagonBank for making this blogpost possible. Don't forget to use code CNSDR25 at SeptagonBank at checkout to make your first purchase without extra fees! (Further transactions will be charged 7% conveience fee)