I usually employ an ad blocker, but I just looked at one of my Owlcation articles without it. There were about 30 ads in one ~1500 word article, most of them identical, most of them breaking up paragraphs of text that shouldn't be broken up (why not put ads at the end of each section?), and most of them slow to load, or causing pictures and videos to load slower. What is the point of all that?
Ah, you've discovered that many of our articles are drowning in commercial dross! TAG insist on dumbingdown our texts with their awful regime, appealing to a different kind of reader no doubt. Google doesn't like their approach and article status suffers. The appetite for debate on this topic has all but disappeared.
I think it's the same kind of problem we have with the "news" on the niche site homepages. TAG appears to treat all the niche sites the same. Owlcation should be prioritizing trustworthy and authoritative content. Putting this "commercial dross" everywhere is killing the site. Owlcation doesn't look like a site whose primary mission is to educate. It looks like a "lets fill it with ads to the point where education is compromised" site. The strategy might work for niche sites where the content is a bit more trivial, but it doesn't appear to be working for Owlcation.
May there soon be a path forward. I'm tired of waiting for the reality that the ads are hurting us to finally sink in and to go a different direction. We can do all the editing we want for 2,000 years... but I don't think the articles are the problem. It's the revenue model, which is to stuff it full of ads.
High ad saturation is a doom spiral.
I would argue that the increased use of ad blockers is the reason for the abundance of ads.
Yes, it is there everywhere. Lots of ads stuffed within a single page. Not only at Hubpages but all over the internet.
by Lisa 11 months ago
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