Please let this not be the future of reading on the web

"...Ad networks like The Deck come to mind..." everytime someone says this I just switch off. The Deck and other hipster brand ad networks are not a workable solution for 99.99% of bloggers, please stop using them as an example of how advertising can be "good"; they're an example of why it can't.

The future of reading on the web is easy to change, all we need to do is pay some money for each article we want to read without adverts...

Unfortunately, the primary impact of putting up a paywall for premium content seems to be to raise huge arguments about why "information wants to be free", not the reality of what happens without one.

I think I have mentioned this in the past on other articles about advertising. The overall game of creating aggressive advertising has not changed, they just now have more tools to do it.

If your going to force me to have a fullscreen ad before reading your content then at least allow me to dismiss it easily with a single click on the ad and not having to hunt for a close button (if there even is one). The amount of times I've had a fullscreen ad completely block a page with no way to remove it..

Regards content, I think this is partly just a function of so many people now reading stuff online. With more people reading things on smartphones/tablets on their way to work on the bus etc there is a market for more "tabloid" style writing that can be consumed quickly.

There are still plenty of people writing high quality content and lots of it gets linked to here on HN.

People will just be more discerning about the content portals they use.

That is exactly why it can't be considered a good option and why it is "bad" for the wider internet. The Deck being selective is saying "we know adverts suck, so if you're actually good you can be in our super neat actually good system!" so instead of solving the problem of bad adverts, they're just ignoring it and saying that the sites they like can be in their small network that doesn't have the problem.

Their entire network does ~100m monthly impressions, that's nothing.

This is why I use Adblock on my desktop, and ReadItLater to extract the text on mobile. Without these the web would be pretty unusable.