I don’t know if it’s just me, but browsing virtually any mainstream website without an ad blocker or with alternative frontends is becoming harder and harder to justify. It’s getting to the point where adblocking isn’t an optional luxury - it’s a requirement to effectively get basic information about things.
Yesterday, I was trying to search some information about Ghouls from Fallout. This lead me to this Fandom wiki page which had ads on almost every corner of the website, autoplaying video in the corner, asking for my age as soon as I clicked on the site, injecting polls and random unrelated videos into the communty wiki content and being incredibly slow to browse. A query that in the past that took 5 seconds now takes 50, for what? Money?
I get that online services cost a shitton amount of money to operate, but the sheer level of degrading quality is not OK. This is just one example of how services are completely barreling towards the shitter at 100+ MPH with no brakes or airbags. I feel some guilt for using content blockers, but that guilt is being wittled away every single day because of websites like this.
That’s only partially true. “Simple” pages like a wiki are stupidly cheap in comparison of operational costs. This is not some online image editor, some huge social media outlet or whatever. From a content perspective, the traffic to be served is an absolute joke.
What drives costs for operations up is stupid design decisions (e.g. Cora) and bloating your own page using several ad providers, trackers and a metric fuck ton of additional services like disqus and whatever all of this idiotic shit is called.
And what drives “cost of operations” up the most is pure greed, because for most parts there is no longer an internet community, where someone wants to contribute something cool. Maybe that’s where they started, but seeing their page hits climb obviously makes them think about monetizing them. Just add some non intrusive ads, page views still climb, and you see the money coming in - in the case of Fandom with mostly zero effort, since the content is brought by the editors, who even also generate ad views, while generating content. Add one more ad, income doubled. Add a potentially more intrusive ad bringing more money per view - maybe your income triples. It’s all just a pump and dump until it becomes the ad-riddled trash, but you don’t really need to care, since it’s still high ranking in Google results and still brings in visitors.
Obviously this does not apply to all, but to a fucking lot if not most pages, and it’s getting even worse with gen-AI content and “features”.