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?

It's annoying but they can't exist for free.

Adblock Plus is very effective on websites and apps. I use their browser on YouTube as well and it eradicates all the ads - genius!

The advertisers are paying, you aren't. Don't bother with them.

Many newspaper sites have made themselves totally unusable and illegible with wall to wall adverts, flashing adverts, advert videos etc. So the sites lose readers, and the adverts are seen by nobody. Idiotic.
As a reader, you need to install adblockers. There's Adblock plus and many others. I'm currently using Brave - very good so far.

I do actually. I have a subscriptions to a number of sites. But I also read blogs and MN and often end up clicking links which posters share to evidence points or highlight obscure news stories or shed further light on something. We should be able to get news and information from a range of sources without having to endure pointless adverts.

I'm heartened to see how many of you agree with me.

This obviously isn't being reported on (by the media who are the culprits) or tackled by anyone but it is an issue and it is getting worse.

And it's not just a failure to pay for journalism anymore. I wouldn't mind some adverts, if they were placed on a page in such a way as to be sensible and not block the primary content I've come to read.

It's also the fact that many of these 'adverts' are not actually adverts for legitimate goods and services but actually clickbate or links to scams. That's unethical and contributing to the creeping decline in the quality of just about bloody everything these days.

I know we are all partly to blame for shit politicians and sweat shop driven fast fashion and the internet being full of porn and gossip and shite content, but ffs, when do we all collectively say ENOUGH!! It has to reach a tipping point soon!

And why can't we just agree (or not agree) ONE time to Cookies, not every single time you open a new page, FFS.

Gov.uk is the worst for this, every single time.

I downloaded an Adblocker and I don’t really see the ads now. There are some sites that won’t let you read with an Adblocker so I just click out of them. No site is that important to me that I will endure pop ups and ads dominating the page.

Adblock plus is your friend, OP.

Pocket? Care to elaborate at all? Sounds too good to be true

I was doing this. But today two online sites I regularly go on, say either accept cookies, for there 1200 "partners" or however many, or pay a subscription to them.

I will look into adblock plus and pocket

To be honest I’d probably just walk away from any site that made it impossible to use it without paying. Im not wedded to any site I couldn’t walk away from.

I've given up on local news websites because of this. OK adverts are necessary to pay for the site and its content, I get that, but they are presented in such an intrusive way, I don't bother anymore.