To say it's impossible to read online news articles anymore because of the adverts?

[Superlambaanana]

It's getting almost impossible to read an online news article these days.

Click on a link and first you'll be bombarded with cookie consents and requests to register or download the app. Then when you X out of those, ads appear top and bottom of the page, strategically placed to make accidentally clicking on them almost unavoidable.

Then when you've finally managed to clear all of that, the article itself is loaded with ads throughout and then all the clickbait stories about 'wait till you see what X celeb looks like now' and 'one thing every woman needs to know'.

Does anyone EVER intentionally click on any of these ads??

Does anyone EVER go on to purchase anything from the webpages they lead to??

How can the newspapers be making money from this stuff??

Add this to the fact that most articles seem to be written by an AI, using primary school level vocabulary, with pointlessly long introductions before getting to the (usually pretty scant) key information and repeating points over and over again.

The energy required to maintain the servers for the internet is crazy anyway, when it's mostly populated by this trash surely it's reached an indefensible level of Black Mirror proportions?

Totally agree it’s absolutely infuriating, I understand they need to make money though advertising but I’ve sometimes given up on articles because it’s actually impossible to read.

Yes I avoid them, do my head in.

I also find Facebook becoming in usable . I see twice the number of ads than friends posts

YA sort of BU. For the most part the cheap shit sites are like that because they just want to maximise the advertising revenue, they're not actually news sites. And in the quality news sites they want you to subscribe because it actually costs money to produce decent news.

Of the old names that still carry some leftover prestige, IMO the Independent is the worst.

and the random ones about cookies,

YANBU - if you try Opera web browser it has 'reader mode' which filters out the crap so you can just read the article. It seems to work on most websites.

The other thing is the ridiculous 'next article ' button which is so prominent that you end up constantly losing the page you were looking at.

I said exactly this to DH last night. Some news sites are worse than others. The Liverpool Echo is a shocker, for example.

I’ve lodged a formal complaint about one of the ads on The Independent site. It pops up on their own video and directs you to a Touch ID payment. I was livid even though I obvs didn’t pay anything to anyone

Adblock Plus. It's free. It will save your sanity

Gosh yes, I don't even try to read them anymore. I wondered if it was just me. I almost started an identical thread actually. It just seems that we are going backwards. We've created a great piece of tech (phone/internet) and then completely render parts of it unusable, due to the stupid way the content is presented. And why can't we just agree (or not agree) ONE time to Cookies, not every single time you open a new page, FFS.

I use pocket. It strips the articles of advertising

Yep, same with recipe sites.

They write so much repetitive waffle before getting to the recipe just so they can intersperse lots of ads.

And you can’t even easily scroll to the bottom because all the HTML or whatever it is means it takes ages for the page to load.

Yes. Thank goodness it’s not just me thinking this.

Bristol Post is horrendous and their ‘journalists’ are borderline illiterate.

Yes, drives me nuts!

And has been for some time. It's strange because I presume they have a paid-for option that they want to lure people into.

Install Brave. Brilliant ad blocker and it's free. I installed it on my phone 3 months ago and so far it's blocked 91k ads and trackers and saved me wasting 2.8g of data.

So pay for a quality paper. How else are journalists (what's left of them) going to get paid?

The Mirror Group local ones Xlive or whatever are the absolute worst. Completely unusable. Almost certainly so they can make you pay for their ad free subscription.

Sorry I'm technically useless, what is this and what's it do?

're op oh god yes, so frustrating. The BBC news website keeps loading, then jumps and reloads then asks me to sign up...no fuck off

I can bear the adverts, as long as they're still. The flashing ones I despise, and when they try to load a video and my whole session slows down, I leave the site and try to find an article on another site covering the story.

Pay a subscription for a decent online newspaper.

(Or put up with the ads)

People want quality news but don't want to pay for it. It's as simple as that.

News costs money to make and (in the case of live news) curate so it has to be paid for somehow.

Otherwise all you'd get is page after page of shite sent to outlets by PR teams.

Why do you expect journalism to be free? Register and or donate or stop whining about adverts.