What a Great Reading Experience!
Make the shitty ads and pop-ups and overlays stop
If you’re surprised by the rise of ad-blockers in spite of the hoops you must jump through in order to install them, I implore you to go try to read an article on the internet. Perhaps try Forbes, for example. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
…and wait. …and wait.
But even beyond the insane loading times thanks to the cruft that is script-based advertising, did you try to actually read the content? Could you even find the content amongst the overlays and ads? Such is the state of reading on the web in 2020.
I pick on Forbes because it’s routinely the worst I see (which also means the worst I actually try to read at times). But this is increasingly true across all sites. TechCrunch, where I worked for many years, is basically unreadable these days. The content itself is fine — it’s just literally hard to read! Even this site, which resides on Medium, has its issues, I’ll admit. While Medium has famously eschewed ads in favor of a subscription model, there are still far too many pop-ups asking us to sign in and/or to sign up for the membership. I get it, you get it. But all we really want to get is the content.
At the same time, there are bills to pay. And because Facebook, Google, and the like have sucked the advertising oxygen out of the digital room, it’s tough to breathe out there. And so high-priced ads yield to many low-priced ads. Which yield to even more at even lower prices. And down and down we go. With content — you know, the actual words on the goddamn page which you came to read — fading from view.
This sucks. Both as a writer and as a reader. And while there are various folks working on interesting solutions for this — Medium’s aforementioned pivot, Scroll, and a whole range of subscription-focused publications — it feels like the underlying problem: what advertising has become, needs a fix as well.
Occasionally, I’ll pick up a physical magazine, like the olden days, to read. And each time I’m surprised by how nice the advertisements are. Now, this is subjective, and most of them are still pretty dumb, but they at least look nice, for the most part. The format makes sense. It’s a full page. Sure, it breaks up the content you’re enjoying, but it does so in a full-bleed way. This makes it not nearly as jarring. Nor does it make the content really any harder to read than a normal page turn does.
Yes, some ads are in-line. In newspapers, in particular. Still, you can tell that actual thought was given to the layout of the page so as to actually be able to read the content. The same is just not true online. Ads are injected anywhere, and increasingly, everywhere. Often blocking the actual content.
Again, it just sucks.
Flipboard and other newer entrants, like Apple News, have tried to solve this by making online ads at least look more premium — you know, like in magazines. But it hasn’t seemed to work. Certainly not at scale. And you can sort of see why: these are digital manifestations of things you know, but simply aren’t needed online: the page turn, for example.
I don’t know the answer here. But I have to believe it resides in working with the content as it is, not as we wish it to be — which, again, often feels like the way it used to be in the era before digital. This is why Facebook’s (including Instagram’s) advertising has seemingly worked so well, leveraging the concept of a feed. And Google’s, leveraging search. So what’s the answer for written content in our digital world without physical pages?
We’ve tried banner ads. And pop-ups. And mid-scroll ads. And in-line ads. And overlay ads. And everything in between — I mean that literally. Perhaps the answer is as simple as content producers getting too “greedy” in the number of ads they’re injecting. But again, they seemingly have to do this because it’s the only way to make the numbers work. I just wonder if there’s a better way with advertising to make the numbers work.
Or maybe it is just our post-advertising world. Certainly, younger generations are being brought up with this notion thanks to Netflix and the like. Still, that would seem to be closing off content to the widest possible audience and runs a very real risk of being elitist — only the best content for those willing to pay directly for it. Feels like there can still be another, better option.
What I do know is that the current state can’t continue. We’re trending towards content taking up 1 pixel of a page with crappy ads taking over the rest. Beyond pop-up-blockers, you’re crazy if you’re not using Pocket, Instapaper, Safari Reader, and the like not just to save articles to read later, but to read all articles. Because they’re the only way you can actually see the words which you wish to read these days.
