The Internet Made Me Sad Today
raganwald.posterous.com
The Internet Made Me Sad Today
1–10 of 186 posts
Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today
#2I'm very interested in the point made regarding interactive children's education. High schools across the country seem to think that giving students iPads to use as text books is a good idea. I think that if I was in high school and I had an iPad, I'd be surfing the web the entire time I was in class. I'm certain that's what the next generation will be doing if high schools do indeed end up going that route.
Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today
#3So that's what a page looks like without Adblock. Interesting.
Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today
#4> Scanning down underneath the diagram, I saw “Play Games on Google+” along with a lot of small text. I kept scanning, thinking that the column of text had something to do with playing games.
Funny, I had the exact opposite reaction. I am so used to skipping over ads with my eyes that I literally didn't even notice there was an ad there; I read the article about dinosaurs, and when I read the above sentence, I had to go back up to the screenshot and verify that there was indeed a Google+ ad there, that I'd totally failed to see.
Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today
#5Install AdBlock Plus. Solved. Not that big of a deal, huh?
Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today
#6So who is the author blaming? He's not blaming the end user (the one that makes those ads worth the most to both google and content sites).
- Is he blaming Google for maximizing ad revenue for the content site?
- Is he blaming the content sites for wanting to maximize their own revenue on page views? (or, perhaps, for being too lazy to sell ads themselves?)
- Is he blaming the people who spend the money to get their scammy ads to show up on these sites?
Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today
#7Install AdBlock Plus. Solved. Not that big of a deal, huh?
I see that I somehow have made the entirely wrong point. I didn’t say that it’s sad that I have to wade through ads. As it happens, I have this “reader” thingie in Safari, which solves the ad problem and the readability problem in one click or keypress.
The thing I was trying to say that makes me sad is that there is a generation of smart people toiling away with the power of what may be the world’s biggest computing infrastructure, all to put those ads on the page.
I am lamenting the waste of people and resources, not the waste of my time.
Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today
#8Install AdBlock Plus. Solved. Not that big of a deal, huh?
Yeah, except that I'm fairly sure that a large percentage of web users don't even know their browser might support plugins, let alone that AdBlock exists.
Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today
#9What's the alternative ?
Having content locked behind a pay-wall so even less people can access it ?
Running ads which are more relevant but don't generate enough revenue to make the site viable in the long term ?
Not having the content at all ?
Re: The Internet Made Me Sad Today
#10From my own experience, it seems that Google tests different contextual content from time to time. They have an algorithm that is supposed to automatically adjust and optimize the ads that get the most click throughs. Perhaps gaming related content works well on that site for some weird reason.
The "sad" part, if anything, is that the publisher decided to place the ad there. In my opinion, that is too misleading.