I haven’t seen any of these annoying ads in a long time. Either I stopped using those websites or some friendly EU law forbids them, perhaps?
Funnily enough, I actually feel bad when I see an ad for something that interests me! I weigh, is it worth the wave of trash ads that will follow? (E.g. I dared to click “buy ps3/ps4 games” because it showed a game that I was looking for, it was a local store, and getting ads for games is acceptable.) I rather type the URL myself instead of clicking the ad.
I’ve been doing a long running experiment (short version: not being logged into anything while browsing, not clicking clickbait) which resulted in the ads being shown to me now to be super boring and generic, which is almost funny.
Why do we even have to have invisible profiles outside our control following us around? Because no web site works for free. Why does it have to be free? Because the richest company starts offering a service for free and powers through the losses until the competitors shut down. As soon as they are the only ones left, they add paid features. And everyone acts as if that was the only option Is that even true?
(YouTube asks for money from companies to show viewers ads, and asks for money from viewers to not show them ads. … … Hmmmmmmmm.)
I pay my favourite content creators via patreon. People used to pay for newspapers every day and it was not too much. (You could also read it for free in a Café.) Can we not find a “pay a coin for the daily newspaper”-like compromise that funnels a little money from many web users to the webpages that they actually use?
(In Germany there’s a (controversial) public TV/radio “tax” that also pays for programs that you disagree with or never watch, that’s not a solution. I’d be willing to pay for the good BBC like journalism though.)
Unfortunately, money is what it is all about so ads ain’t going away any time soon…
I have noticed that in the last year, erasing history and cookies no longer completely erases the tracking.
Used to, I could order some pants from amazon. I would see ads for pants everywhere I went. So I would erase my search history and cookies and boom, pant ads gone.
That’s what I call the invisible profile that is following us. You don’t have control over it anymore, and I’m sure I could not fully escape it either.
It’s a profile pieced together out of browser info plus IP address. Browser info contains also operating system, screen size, language, plugins, just certain harmless settings.
You are not Lisa Simpson who deleted her cookies. You are “profile 1234567890”, that one of the people from 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield, who uses a small screened mobile device, whose second language was set to Spanish (for practicing) and third language was set to Icelandic (as a prank), with an outdated OS, typically online in the evenings and nights, looking at dresses and cat jokes. This profile gets sold to companies that publish girl, child, and pet-oriented ads.
Why not? My taxes pay for roads I never drive on. For schools I have no young children to educate. For Coastguards to keep safe a boat I do not own, and never sail. For unemployment benefits I can never claim. But I accept that whilst I may have no use for these things, many other people do - and I wish to live in a society where these needs are met - so I accept the taxes.
In democratic taxation policy, there is a concept of “public good”. The idea that certain services are neccesary to a society, and the state should provide them through taxation, regardless of whether specific individuals need or want them.
Broadcast media is a powerful force in general education, and in the shaping of public opinion. It should not only be the province of biased commercial or political interests. An independent broadcaster is not just a “nice to have” - it’s an absolute need.
If there’s anything I’m envious off, it’s the British TV License fee. It does exactly what it’s supposed to do, keep advertising off of government run broadcasting networks etc.
Ours used to be like that. Then it wasn’t. We have the license and ads now. And each subsequent government has continued to bastardise it into the freak it is now. Having a phone is now reason to get fined for not paying a TV license.
I think last time we had a discussion about TV licenses, we brought up those TV license scanning vans that actually did nothing, they were just a scare tactic
That’s a very common misconception. The BBC is not the voice of the UK government. It is not the “State” broadcasting service. It’s a mistake even our own politicians frequently make - they expect the BBC to agree with current government policy, and get very upset when they don’t.
The BBC is completely independent of government. It has a Charter, and a Board of Directors (also independently appointed). It was deliberately set up to be completely unbiased, and free of either commercial or political interference. The only thing the government does is collect the licence fee.
Even the tax is kind of voluntary. If you don’t own a TV, you don’t have to pay the licence fee. That concept has become fairly muddled since the introduction of streaming to computers and smartphones, but it still holds good in theory - if you don’t watch, you don’t have to pay.
Reading through these recent posts about TV advertising brought to mind a nearly fogotten annoyance with modern TV (that I’d forgotten because I don’t watch TV anymore.
Us oldies would remember a time when TV shows were structured in such a way that you could almost predict an ad break & then duck off for a moment, knowing 2 minutes or so later you could be back on the sofa with a cookie & tea, in time for the next segment. Even movies were interupted somewhat respectfully, with a title banner & a pause.
Then came the change that drove me away from TV. They started just ad bombing rather randomly, cutting in mid sentence, ruining movies & blasting adverts at a louder volume than the show you were watching.
I found YouTube became a good replacement for wasting time & my TV became the domain of the Playstation, but now YouTube also bombs with ads randomly often forcing me to skip backwards to catch the interupted bit. They also nerfed the old trick of scrolling to the end & replaying to avoid ads entirely. More recently they brought in the lock on the screen sizing so you can’t idle-scroll through other content while an ad is playing unless you already had the quarter-sized screen up.
Given I favour science documentaries & a few content makers whose manual work I enjoy watching, I don’t see a huge amount of what’s trending & generally ignore most of it. I do get swamped with ads for crap I have no intention of buying though & may soon just move over to a no advert subscription service like Nebula. Very sad to see YouTube become the mess it became because I quite enjoy the bloke-in-his-shed fixing stuff which is pretty much a You Tube only arena.
It wasn’t randomly over here, it was very predictable, by the clock. The worst channels at their height inserted a five minute add-block every 15 minutes, regardless of what was happening. Since that made the movies run for too long (a 90 minute movie was now suddenly 115 minutes long), they would often cut scenes from the movie, making it effectively unwatchable.
I have no idea how they still made any money at all. I watched one movie like that, and then was appalled forever.
I still have a TV. I still watch it. But, I watch the channels that specialize in things. The channels that play old shows still have ads at predictable intervals. TCM plays old movies with no ads at all. I have my favorite, flipping, fixer upper channel which is still predictable with ads.
I cannot stomach ads during a movie so I rarely watch those channels.
One thing they have added, and it is nice, are streaming channels. They only have ads at very predictable intervals, usually halfway through and in between shows.
I have found that the heaviest ad-laden shows are… … news channels. Yeah. 5 min of what’s terrible with ads dispensed for an equal amount of time. It is horrific. You wait and wait and wait for them to tell you about some important event, you get a few sentences then more ads. I never watch news channels any more.
Yep. I think it was an Indiana Jones movie I was enjoying, during some particularly iconic scene it just cut to an ad midway through & I simply missed a favourite chunk. Yes, I had it on DVD so could watch it anytime but that I think that was the closest I’ve gotten to rage quitting something because I destinctly recall being annoyed enough to just turn off the TV & it was after that, that I found myself avoiding regular TV altogether & have done so ever since. Sort of the final straw.
I did use the TV a bit during all the Covid19 stupidity, simply to have some idea what was going on, but 99% of the time it was muted because the over-the-top screaming headline banners were plenty to know what ‘drama’ was playing out today. What a shit-show that was. Hard to believe it was ‘years’ ago now.
I rather type the URL myself instead of clicking the ad.
