Ads? What ads?

Posted on 2022-01-30

In the last week I thought about advertisements on the internet, and how I achieved to block most, if not all advertisements on the web.

Ads

We all love to hate on them, ads on the web. As a concept, ads are not bad, they enable everyone to use a website for free. But the implementation of ads on the web are mostly really bad.

The first big problem is personalized ads. Such ad systems strive to know the user better than they probably know them self. Name and date of birth are probably some of the not-so-bad attributes known to ad companies, these companies want to know (and probably already know):

Exact position at every point of time

Browsing history

Gender

Ethnicity

Sexuality

Hobbies

much, much, much more

With all this aggregated data, these companies will decide what ads you will most likely click. Some people might argue "But seeing personalized ads is great! At least I see things that interest me.". The problem is not what is shown to the people, it is what data a ad company has on the user to decide that he will likely click on a ad.

Another big problem is the amount of ads on the web. If I may bring in a quote of Sorrento, the bad guy in the movie Ready Player One:

> It's not our job to make them happy, its out job to make [the shareholders] money. [...]

> We estimate we can sell up to 80% of an individuals visual field before inducing seizures.

And this quote is pretty accurate for many sites on the web. They don't seek to show interesting content, they just want to show as many ads as possible, writing a few sentences so that the user actually thinks the content is interesting to keep the users hooked for a few seconds, and earn tons of money this way. Some websites on smaller screens may even break the 80% estimate introduced by Sorrento.

The above mentioned reasons have lead me to abandon ads on the web using ad blockers on all of my browsers on all of my devices, including moving to some other way to consume content like YouTube.

Sponsorships

But as already mentioned above, only most of the ads are terrible, there are also some good ads in my opinion. Some of the good advertisements are sponsorships.

If I may point to some examples, one of them would probably be "The Linux Experiment" on YouTube/Lbry. He has many sponsorships with companies including Linode and Slimbook. These sponsorships are mostly at the beginning and end of every video, with good marks on what is a sponsorship making it easy to skip. Furthermore, these ads mostly matches the content he makes, thus none of the above mentioned problems are noticeable.

The Linux Experiment (Website)

Linode

Slimbook

But of course not all sponsorships are great, the most notable one probably being the sponsor of today's blog post, Raid Shadow Legends.

> With Raid Shadow Legends you can play a boring game totally not pay to win, it is super enjoyable and bla bla bla. If you sign up with the code IDontLikeRaidShadowLegends you will get free 200 gold coins and as a additional bonus the character "super destroyer teddy bear of doom HD". Again, thanks for sponsoring this post.

(Disclaimer: Obviously I do not have a sponsorship with this company, and as I always skip those, I also have no idea what the actual content of those sponsorships are, but this is how I always like to think of them).

Such sponsorships are mostly really frequent, mostly with text the creator has to read in front of their consumers, with a few clips playing the game. These ads mostly do not have anything to do with the shown content, sometimes the creator is playing a game and being sponsored by a completely different game. Such sponsorships obviously fall under the bad-ads category, having both of the above mentioned problems.

Improvements

Like seen above, most ads on the web are bad. But how can this be improved? Honestly, I have no idea. Of course showing random (not personalized) ads or limiting the number of ads on the screen is always a possibility, but such things might not be enough to keep small websites running. And sponsorships are likely just a option for already well-known websites. And just trying to live from donations is probably impossible for almost all websites.

What do you think, how could ads be improved?

Summary

Most of the ads on the web are bad, or really bad. Therefore, as previously mentioned, I always use adblockers on the web. As all of the sponsorships I usually see are of channels I enjoy, I do not have any mechanism to skip those, mostly just skipping forward until I see that the sponsorship has ended, and sometimes I just keep the sponsorship running just because they are not that bad.

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