FreshSaga will never have any form of paid advertisements. Yes, you read that right. Ironically these words come from someone who has a degree in Marketing. If anyone has to have a passion for ad campaigns, sponsored content and mass manipulation, it must be me, right?
Why do I loathe advertisements so deeply? Not only do I share the generally-shared opinion that ads can be annoying and obnoxious. But I firmly believe that advertisements have become a curse of the internet. They ruin the user experience, undermine the objectivity of publishers, make the distribution of online revenue skewed and will destroy all popular platforms eventually. Ads simply make the entirety of the world wide web slower, less fun, less secure and subject to manipulation.
User Experience
Ads predate the internet. Wall posters, sign boards and promotional rock paintings tell us that commercial messages were present in ancient times. Times so ancient that the target audience wouldn’t even think of saying: ‘Jesus, this ad is annoying’. The majority of ads were always consumed in a passive manner. Think of billboards, commercials, ads in newspapers and magazines. This means that it was hard to tailor your ads to specific groups and target individuals. This changed when the internet arrived. It brought interactivity.
During the 90s and 00s, pop-up ads were still a thing. We became extremely skilled at clicking red crosses. But luckily all those pop-up ads disappeared, right? No, not really. Free mobile games are still stuffed with them. And think of auto-playing commercials on YouTube. They might not ‘pop-up’ like the old ads do, but they even occur in the middle of 12-minute videos nowadays. TV commercials are not even that frequent. Okay, you can usually skip them after 5 seconds, but imagine how much better your user experience would be without them? And it’s not just Google selling their ad space. Almost all major content creators have to resort to sponsored content. If you do the math, usually 5% – 20% of a video is some guy with green hair trying to convince me to learn something on Skillshare or control my monkey brain with Headspace meditation sessions.
Ads are sometimes designed to intentionally have a poor user experience. Confusing, attention-grabbing animations and variable ad dimensions shifting the entire app element all over the place. It is almost as if they want you to make accidental clicks.
A special mention goes out to cookie consent banners. Their intent is good, but how effective are they really if everyone just taps the first green button that appears on screen? The lion’s share of cookies pop-ups ask for your consent to display personalized ads and collect your data to serve you more personalized ads in the future. If personalized ads weren’t that ubiquitous in the first place, I doubt we would’ve ever seen those cookie pop-ups. So let’s just blame advertising platforms for that as well.
Objectivity
Sponsored posts, branded content and advertorials; they are everywhere. Whether it is Ryan Reynolds promoting some american gin on his Twitter, beauty bloggers on YouTube telling you which lip stick to put on or Shell trying to deceive their followers with some greenwashing articles. We start doubting all words we read on the internet, as if we need to find out who’s funding it first. The bigger the audience of a celebrity, influencer or YouTube-channel, the more profitable ad revenues become. Sometimes it is so hard to distinguish the actual content from sponsored content. And it’s not only about the posts you CAN see, it’s also about not posting sensitive news or negative opinions. If your income depends on ad revenues from a big organization, you won’t go around spreading harmful content about them. Individual content creators become employees of their biggest clients.
