I mention this because there are times when I visit a news website and I am greeted with a message that says, “you are running an adblocker. Either unblock our ads or pay for a subscription”.
Guess what? I’m doing neither. I just close the website that showed me that message, go to google and search for the headline of the story I wanted to read. I do this because guess what else? For every website that thinks it’s content is valuable (it isn’t), there are ten more that have copied/pasted the same story from AP/Reuters/etc… who aren’t blocking me.
Masslive is a perfect example of a copy/paste “news” site. I’m willing to bet that a vast majority of content on masslive comes from another source and masslive is simply a reseller of someone else’s work. They pop up that, “unblock or subscribe” message every time I accidentally click on a link that takes me to their incredibly biased and inaccurate “news” site. They do it even if the story I’m clicking on has the byline “Associated Press”.
Want to know something masslive? All of those stories you post from the AP and Reuters are available on… wait for it… the AP and Reuters websites!
Why do I block ads? Because websites like masslive put more work and effort into their ads than they do into their content. The clincher for me was two years ago when masslive popped a full screen political ad, complete with sound, for a woman running for office in a town I don’t live in and can’t vote in. They popped that full page ad over top of every page you visited on their website.
When I visit a website and I notice that within 5 seconds of opening the page my computer cooling fan kicks on, I know that there are a lot of background applications being run that I don’t want running. I know that every ad on that website is some kind of java/flash/”pick yer poison” code that is using 90% of my available CPU power and probably writing tons of tracking data onto my hard drive.
If content providers simply ran small static ads, not video or audio ads, there would be no demand for adblockers and all of these content producers would still make money selling advertising space. But they won’t do that because despite the fact they constantly remind us that the constitution guarantees us a “free press”, the news media is most definitely a for-profit business that is for sale to the highest bidder. And right now, the highest bidder happens to be a bunch of scam artists. When I use my work computer to visit a website, I've seen ads for special masks that prevent coronavirus (no such thing), sure-fire investments (also no such thing) and single women in my area looking for me (stay the hell away from me).
And for the record, I’m not singling out masslive because they are the only ones doing it. I’m singling them out because they are local to me and the google news aggregator constantly links me to stories they post that google thinks are important to me. It's not just masslive, all of the alleged “free press” websites are nothing more than money-grabbing hypocrites.
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Wow, I got a bit wordy there. Sorry about that.
To make up for it, here's a very amusing picture I found on the interwebs today:
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Now I'm going to watch a little baseball and then some hockey. After that, I'm going to bed and try to sleep all night long.
Here are some links for you to visit:
- Krazy Kim and his little sister, Krazier Kim, are up to no good.
- Oh no! Where will parents go to brawl in front of their kids?
- Technically, alcohol was involved.
- Only in Florida.
- After listening to de Blasio prattle on like an uptight puritan, I'm pretty sure the New York City government needs to stay the hell out of peoples sex lives.
- Here's your Naked Guy(s) in the News story.
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