JazzB1987 said:
I have the feeling that alot of your replies completely miss the point. (no offense let me explain please)
There is no "either it is annoying ads and professionals or no ads but shit content made by little kids" scenario There is the also the "professionals doing professional stuff without annoying the consumers because they choose to have reasonable ads that are no obstacle in experiencing the site. Just like a few years ago" path the internet could go.
Its not just black and white there also is alot of actually nice grey and the userbase is completely okay with the grey zone the problem is the industry. It is completely unwilling to even think about a compromise.
Alot of the sites started as a hobby etc. and went from "I am the proud creator of this site and I still create some of the content on my own and I also participate in the community because I love it its my little baby" to "I once created the community but after it got successful I couldn't be bothered to do things anymore so I hired some people that will keep the site going and tell them to implement more and more annoying things that will generate revenue because I dont visit my own site anymore so why would I care if its ad infested."
Sometimes its also: I also could just have handed the site over to the community e.g my former mods etc. when I realized that its time for me to move on but I decided against it because I am a dick or because some fucking huge company out there knows that I would sell my soul and my grandma to the devil for some cash so I sold my baby (the website) to a greedy company. ka-ching $$$. And now they spam the site with commercials to get the money back they just spent on my site.
A few years ago the internet was not worse in terms of websites and their content but the user experience was much better and it still worked. If the actual quality of the sites would increase at the same ratio/speed the ads get annoying/the experience gets worse .... the whole discussion would actually be debatable but the way it is right now is just wrong.
I mean alot of people started to block ads because their online experience got worse and worse not because they hate ads in general. Stuff like popups showed up and when you actually want to close the popup it opens another annoying tab in your browser (who the f said you are allowed to ue my browser rofl) Then you watch a video and somewhere on the site some AXE/Lynx commercial starts with sound etc (its using flash which is complete shit btw and slows down even new computers) Then you were suddenly forced to watch 1min commercials of a product you hate anyways before you were able to see the 20 second video you actually wanted to see. And then there also is intellitext which makes it impossible to move the mouse over text without a billion of little popups showing up OMG!
btw this is intellitext:
It scans the site for words and if a word like "Playstation" is there (or any other word that is either an item or a category in any kind of shop) it automatically links the word to sites like Amazon.com etc. and if you move your mouse over the word "Playstation" by accident a big popup appears. Despite its name its not intelligent at all its just dumb.
Seriously most people would not give a f if the website background image is a nice looking ad. Or if there is a 5 seconds "this video is brought to you by game X or company X.
I even downloaded some of them years ago because I loved the design (quite suitable as nice desktop wallpapers)
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You know there is a site out there that is doing what you're saying, the whole unintrusive ad thing. The site is Reddit and it didn't really work very well for them, they now have a counter on the side of their page showing how many people have to still buy "Reddit Gold" every day, just so Reddit can carry its server costs.
You know, people are acting here as if all website admins are rich and greedy, whereas in reality there are just bills that need to be paid.
If you want to blame someone, then blame the advertisers for not being willing to pay for unintrusive ads, because they don't see them as effective.
I would never argue against some ads going too far and become way too intrusive, but the way the guy in the video asked the question was just scummy, acting proud for not supporting the creators and even wanting them to go down... and some people in this thread have shown a very similar stance.
If there was another way to keep the internet free and for the creators to still pay their bills, then I'd be all for it, but as it stands something like this doesn't really exist unfortunately and cutting the money out from the internet just doesn't work.