Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Tuesday morning irony

Your "no shit, Sherlock" moment of the week is today brought to us by Yahoo News.

The amount of advertising we are exposed to on a daily basis is stunning.  Advertisers and marketroids of the world leave no stone unturned in their desperate attempts to shove as much commercial crap in our faces as possible, and the web makes this worse - not only are we paying for it to be delivered to us, but it's targeted.

(If you think it's not, try visiting a few websites like rcgroups.com on a smartphone, then look at news.com.au - like magic, all of the banners are now for Hobbyking!  The pricks just read the cookie off your phone and targeted you.  Great, eh?)

I know I long since developed banner blindness to the point where I need to be careful what I look at at work, because I honestly don't see the NSFW sidebars that plenty of indy-style websites support their costs with.  It also makes for the odd awkward conversation when the handbrake walks into my office and sees one, because I'm honestly reading the review on USB3 bandwidth or whatever.  (Seriously.  If I wanted to look at porn I'd find something a lot better than a banner ad to look at.)

Unsurprisingly, the advertisers of the world have arisen from their pools of slime to study the phenomenon, the better to overcome our natural tendencies as humans to form patterns of association and learn what's likely to be worth our taking the time to absorb, and what's likely to be useless crap, like pretty much anything that Alan Jones has to say.

So, onto Yahoo's revelation that ad-blocking by frustrated consumers has grown 41% in the last year, and shock and horror, it's costing the poor bastards money!  Oh, the huge manatee!



Personally I think Chrome with Adblock is pretty much mandatory for using the web these days - it even strips out those bloody annoying unskippable inline ads at the start of Youtube videos.

What I find splendidly ironic is that Adblocker has dropped 20 ads on the Yahoo page alone...




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