The irritating thing to me here is that I actually don't mind the concept of advertising. Mostly it's the implementation. Newspaper ads don't bug me one bit, because they're not physically capable of moving, animating, dancing, and trying to get my attention. They're not physically capable of tracking my habits and reporting them back to the mothership. They're just... there. Passive. Occasionally interesting, or at least pleasantly designed.

If internet advertising was more like newspaper advertising, I wouldn't feel quite so compelled to go out of my way to block it. But no, someone somewhere along the way decided it had to be actively distracting, and track those impressions, and the industry just can't help itself. It's rotten to the core.

100% agree!

The other day I was thinking how pleasant it was to read a newspaper (26 years ago) compared to reading the news online today.

With a newspaper, the paragraph you are currently reading doesn't suddenly jump out of view just because some ad finally loaded or was replaced by a different sized ad. The ads were static and so inoffensive back then, but they still made the newspapers lots of money.

There are downsides to newspapers, of course: they are unwieldy on the train, they kill trees, and they get out-of-date really fast.

If some decent publication could replicate the good parts of a newspaper for a modern tablet device ($0.50 or whatever per issue, the ads are static images and never replaced after the page is loaded, and no jumping content), I think I would pay.

Magazines on the other hand could get annoying, especially with the scratch-n-sniff perfume/cologne ads.

Otherwise, I agree with the bad thing about ads is adTech and not ads themselves. The internet just allowed our worst selves to run rampant with the obvious result coming to fruition.

Anyone who visited a Wendy's in the 1980s or 1990s knows that newspaper ads can also make for interesting tabletop decorations

They didn't bug me in the 90s but 3 decades of deeply annoying internet ads have kinda made me allergic to them.

I don't think I'll ever stop using an adblocker. Even if ads would become less annoying or if it would become illegal to use an adblocker or something.

You gotta punch the monkey though! Isn’t that fun?!

But no, that is how we got here. Internet ads were novel until they were just irritating.

But do you think the concept of advertising is the best solution to the problem it tries to solve? I have serious doubts.

Sure, 100 years ago you had no other way to make something known, but today with everybody having a smartphone there might be other ways. I always would like to see reviews of stuff from my immediate network of friends (or, let's say 2-3 connections) - wouldn't that be much better? Of course, the whole ad industry will have zero interest to promote something like this, where they loose control and the process might be actually efficient.