A month ago I wrote about why I was still using an ad blocker. The TL;DR was that unfiltered websites have become too horrible to be usable. Ads popup to cover the content you’re trying to read, videos play—and loudly—without being invited, and the site doesn’t stabilize for quite a while. Sometimes this activity continues for as long as you’re on the site. Take a look at this site without an ad blocker to see what I mean.
I’m not the only one who has noticed this. Over a Daring Fireball, John Gruber has a post that discusses this problem by reporting on Shubham Bose’s post on The 49MB Web Page. Bose’s post gets its name from this experience:
I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled.
Gruber and Bose explore this phenomenon and explain why it happens. It’s obvious that the dreadful user experience that these sites deliver aren’t for the readers’ benefit but, they argue, they’re also not for news sites’ benefit. The only ones who benefit are the diseased surveillance-based advertising industry.
The readers lose because it takes time and cognitive overload to read a simple story. The news sites lose because abusing readers is not sustainable and those readers will abandon the news sites when they’ve had enough. But the news sites have decided on the short term advantage of a few ad impressions rather than the long term advantage of sustaining and growing their readership. As I said, only the execrable surveillance-based advertisers win.
It’s way past time that we, the readers, started refusing to play this game and simply ignore the sites that abuse us. My guess is that it would have already happened were it not for the fact that every sane person is using an ad blocker.