Posted 08/30/2026
Okay, seriously, what's the deal with advertising these days?
Sometimes while I'm at the library, I'll read some magazine articles. Ads in magazines are relatively respectful, usually taking up half a page or a full page/spread, NEVER inserted in the middle of content (as far as I've seen). Compare this to how many websites handle advertising, and the difference is night and day - ads with motion, ads in the middle of a paragraph, banner ads, footer ads, ads you can't skip; to top it all off, use an adblocker, and some sites will try and block YOU in return.
If a website ever turns me away due to using an adblocker though, I simply don't use that site. Most ad models on websites make the sites borderline unusable. Definitely unusable if it's mostly text-based and you're trying to focus on reading something without distraction.
And then there's the data they collect in order to target people better... now, online, I'd say it'd almost be foolish in a capitalist, free-market system NOT to collect some data about people online in order to serve more relevant ads. But, as far as time, effort, respectfulness and whatever else goes, it really should've stopped at the same level that magazines can deliver "targeted" ads. Someone picks up a car magazine? They're probably interested in cars, so show the audience ads about cars. Boom, the ad has reached an appropriate audience.
On the other hand, on the internet, advertisers have gone so far as to pack tons of information into cookies and tracking links, built nigh-uncontrollable/unpredictable algorithms in order to target people's interests with deadly precision and turned social networking sites not into places of community, but into places where people dump all their info in order to be harvested to create, like, a digital clone of you in a vat of amniotic fluid, in order to study and prod at to serve more relevant ads.
Now, I won't deny there's been incentive somewhere in the process of developing person-behavior/interest-tracking methods online for advertisers to sell that data off to people who will do more nefarious things with it than send people ads, but surely the majority of this really began or has been developed mostly at the request of suits and shareholders. But... why?? Why jump through DECADES of hoops and pour billions, if not trillions, into all this tracking technology when the problem of serving relevant ads was basically solved all the way back in the days of topic-centric magazines, like the car magazine example I mentioned? I find it super hard to believe that all that tracking and relevant-ad-serving has provided SO much of a return on investment that the ad industry will continue to double down on tracking and enshittification... surely that will plateau, right? There has to be an endgame for how much effort they put into tracking - when it will stop yielding high returns on such an investment, right??
If you tell me that all the tracking and whatnot really is just a project to create a surveillance state, I'll accept that answer readily, because there's no way it makes sense from a business perspective.
Especially when I block ads on websites and leave ones that don't allow me to... yeah yeah, I know, not everyone does this... but you can't block an ad in a magazine... moral of the story, advertisements are annoying.
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