I feel so lucky! (Re: Ads? What ads?)

2022-01-31

Recent post by moddedBear about ads, especially linked screenshot, made me realise how lucky I actually am.

Re: Ads? What ads?

Sometimes (due to change of browser of computer) I find myself browsing without enabled adblocker. And usually it takes several hours, if not days, until I realise that.

I think that it's mostly because on WWW I visit mostly sites like Hacker News or habr.com, its Russian alternative, which don't have too many of them. Sites linked from HN might have ads, of course, but quite often I find it that the more ads a site have - the less interesting it will be, and the other way around. Check, for example, danluu.com: no ads, awesome articles! Maybe it's because interesting articles come from people blogging in their spare time and not planning to profit from it? And not from corporations who make articles to show ads and make money??

danluu.com - HTTP website with good design, awesome articles, and no ads.

And yes, have anyone saw any single ad here in Gemisphere? :)

Anyway, I believe that I'm very lucky that I don't visit sites that fight for ads too much - the only general-purpose adblock I have installed is the /etc/hosts file from winhelp2002. No fancy URL or CSS-selector filters. Only a separate extension to block ads on youtube - because well, it's faster to add extension to a browser than wait until you can skip that ad. :-) I heard there were some heated arguments recently about Google Chrome WWW browser introducing some unwanted changes to its adblock API for extensions - but sorry, I can't care less. I assume you would still be able to block ads on youtube? Otherwise - not a big loss!

https://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

----

Also, this quote from the original article by Schmiddi:

> And just trying to live from donations is probably impossible for almost all websites.

Ads? What ads?

Made me wonder: in pre-Internet world, have any newspaper managed to survive only on ads?

Apparently, yes! The biggest example is "Metro" - it started first in Sweden in 1995, and later expanded abroad. In 2019 it stopped publishing in Sweden, but is still alive (and rocking) in other countries.

Metro International (wiki)

Also, there is a WWW website, where you can look at paper issues online. There you can see the text-to-ads ratio. Also note that ads are somewhat non-personalized (Well, they might be personalized to your city, but no more).

Today issue for Moscow, Russia (1.82M)

Locally saved screenshot (1.9M)

Dec 2019 issue for NY, USA (I assume they stopped publishing after that - 1.62M)

Locally saved screenshot (2.5M)

You can see that it's getting close to 80% in the NY edition with 6 full-page ads, but quite less in the Moscow edition. I would say it's about 20 to 30%, maybe?