rankly Madame, I don’t give a deer.
It’s not true. In fact, I do give a deer. In fact you can have all of mine. They are murder on my trees. But what I really mean to say is that I’ve had it up to here with websites complaining about my supposed ad blocker.
Websites are suddenly becoming very aggressive about this. We all want them to be paid for their work. But no, I’m not turning off anything. I’m not the least bit sorry your website’s business model depends on blasting ads that crawl, jump, hop around, and hog my CPU. Your marketing failures do not constitute an obligation on my part to reconfigure my computer.
There. I got that off my chest.
It’s the same trajectory that is killing broadcast TV and AM radio: the ads drive viewers away, profits drop, so they need even more ads. It’s an classic death spiral.
Nowadays 87% of Americans refuse to answer their phone unless they recognize the number. About 60% of phone calls are unsolicited spam. For those who use their phone infrequently, almost all incoming calls are spam. If not for texting and 5G, the phone companies would be in trouble as people would search for alternatives.
But the real question is: why do we hate ads so much? If the products were actually something we wished to buy, we’d welcome ads, maybe even pay for them.
There were once actual magazines that did just that: Computer Shopper, a 300-page magazine consisting entirely of computer ads with one or two fluff articles (as in Playboy, nobody ever actually read them), was one. Another was Engineering Opportunities, which consisted mainly of ads by defense contractors telling engineers what a exciting place to work their company was. It had such beautiful artwork that my seventh grade art teacher tried to steal my copy. Those magazines were honest and they knew the products were something the customer wanted and happily paid to learn about.
If a website had ads for patch cables, bearings, avalanche photodiodes, or anything else on my “Need to find a source for” list, I’d welcome the ads. I might even click on them. Advertisers are wasting resources by trying to sell people products they don’t want. Their intrusiveness drives people to search for an alternative to the Internet.
It seems to me that we hate ads not for their ugliness and crassness, but because they are telling us something false about ourselves.
At the moment one website is showing me a pair of men’s leather shoes. The shoe flips over and over and some guy keeps picking it up and dropping it. Why they think this will make the shoe desirable I can only guess. Another ad has a plastic eagle with stars and stripes on its wings. The ad says it lights up in the dark thanks to an attached solar panel.
Now, landscape lights are useful. I put some up so trick-or-treaters and cookie-selling girl scouts don’t trip over the crack in my driveway. But a glow-in-the-dark eagle would be too dim, and it would be useless unless it repels woodpeckers. Based on my experience with plastic owls, it wouldn’t work for that either. The woodpeckers saw it for what it was: a predator effigy. They used it for target practice. That plastic eagle would be covered with white goo in a week.
I scroll down and there’s that stupid shoe ad again. And a third time. A fourth time. If I could remember the brand name, I’d boycott it.
By far the worst are the TV ads showing some version of viagra or a similar drug. The purple envelope comes in, and the guy is such a doofus he can’t figure out how to get it open. He tears at the package frantically, turning it in different directions, his lady friend waiting patiently, all to no avail. My guess is that what this guy really needs is an IQ enhancing drug. Sadly there is no such thing.
Content ultimately determines whether the viewer will pay. This is basic motivational calculus: you sum up the positives and the negatives of some action. If it comes out a net positive, the person will do it. If not, he won’t. So whether the customer sends you money depends on whether the quality of your writing exceeds the awfulness of your ads.
Putting a guilt-inducing blurb at the bottom of each article, as the UK Guardian does, is probably a safer strategy in the long run. The editors assume that if you read the whole article, you must have wanted it and you’ll be afraid of not getting more like it. If left-wing fanatics can handle this basic marketing fact, anyone can.
But if you were a science magazine that used groupthink and name-calling instead of hard evidence to make your case, as the two top ones do, that would also weigh heavily in my motivational calculus. Even going ad-free might not help.
The DVD industry’s tactic of threatening you at the beginning of each movie with Interpol, five years in prison, and a $250,000 fine obviously won’t work. That, like those shoes that keep flipping over, makes us think the company has such an inflated view of itself it can risk alienating us. Websites and advertisers are missing an opportunity. Let people tell you what they want to buy, and they’ll click. Tell them they’re doofuses and you’ll go unread.
jul 19 2026, 5:31 am
