Am I the only that thinks news online sites are becoming unusable?

[KWR65]

A year ago I installed a ad blocker that made the web sites readable without pop up ads and automatic playing video ads. But now if you use an ad blocker they block you. When you turn it off to view a web page you get pop ups, autoplay commercials and ads that surround the article that have movement so you are simply distracted so hopefully you will accidentally click one of their ads. Even the non-profit AP web site is now doing this.
Now I will just scan the headlines and not even bother clicking links to their sites. I use sites like reddit and here to get just the first paragraph of the news and not bother with the news sites any longer.
This is just my two cents worth.

[braddy]

1. It's called greed, they want to suck up as much money as they can as quickly as they can.

A business has to grow and thrive to survive but what happened to balancing it with some basic self-imposed limits of dignity, company image, the long view, etc.

[Rhiannon12866]

2. I have to agree, they all insist you "subscribe" as well.

How many hundred to I have to subscribe to, just to scan the occasional news article I run across?

[shraby]

3. The very worst part is you can pick up a virus from their shitty ads.

[mindem]

4. The whole internet is pretty much useless

The amount of irritating advertising a person has to endure just to get a little information is incredible.

[Squinch]

5. I keep the ad blocker. Not that long ago I got my news from

reading the paper and watching the nightly news, maybe a news magazine or two a month. If a site blocks me, I figure I don't need it.

(I'm doing that "get off my lawn" thing, aren't I? )

[NJCher]

6. totally with you on that

I have to have my sound blocked to use most of those sites. And yes, I know what you mean about them blocking you. I get a free NY Times subscription because of my work, though, so I get some news from it.

[Wounded Bear]

7. I hear you...

It can be really annoying. Not to mention if you do happen to click on something it'll take you down some weird rabbit hole endlessly clicking more and more pages searching for something you didn't really want to look at anyway.

[smirkymonkey]

8. I agree. There are very few sites I make use of because of it.

It's such an annoyance. Why don't they realize that they are driving users away with all these pop up ads and videos. There are certain sites I refuse to visit anymore because I can't tolerate the constant distraction.

[RandiFan1290]

9. I was just reading something about this

It is from Reddit about a new company called 'Coil'

https://www.reddit.com/r/Ripple/comments/8jz65f/coil_another_bright_future_for_xrp/

Hey folks!


...

The company COIL will have projects targetting micropayments & monetizing the internet! If you happen work for a company that gathers revenue from digital content on the internet, you know the work used to be hard and the revenue low. The reason why the market has so much 'clickbait' articles nowadays is because that is their bread and butter. Coil can change this, Coil can change a lot of things for us in the future. Where it used to be impossible to make a bankpayments for less than a cent (and even cents will cost more than it will benefit the other) - with XRP and ILP you can expect micropayments, microearnings on ads and the quality of internet. This is not just a business that will generate some revenue form products they sell - and happen to use XRP - this project is designed to better the world, change the way we are used to online. This means 2 major companies, and 2 major teams with extremely skilled devs are both working as hard as they can to change the world using XRP! This is another concept for the Internet of Value!


Think.. netflix, think spotify, think about companies where you need to make a monthly payment to be able to get all content while you are not actually using them, or that moment where you don't want to pay a monthly fee just because you like that one show, so you rather try to download an illegal copy.. With Coil you might be abl to get whatever content you want, instantly available by XRP purchase, without being forced to pay for all the other things you don't use anyway! Think spotify, think uber, think ads on the web - or no more ads on the web! Vimeo, watching a stream, finally being able again to use your youtube playlist at a party without having the annoying ads in between your music list where the volume is way to high.

...

[Ron Obvious]

10. Why can't a better adblocker pretend to show ads and fool the sites?

I'm not entirely sure how a site detects that an adblocker is installed, but I assume there's some script in the ads that needs to be executed in order for the site to think the ad has been displayed.

I'd like to see an adblocker that mimics everything correctly so as to make the site think the ad has been shown, but not actually show the ad. Seems doable to me.

Is this technically feasible?

[Phentex]

11. agree completely...

Sometimes I just want to read about a local news story and I end up experiencing what you describe. I don't know why they assume I want a video of the story when I can just read the text.