1185: Top Ten Panty Shots in Video Games

I’m not normally a big fan of Ben Kuchera’s work (for reasons I won’t go into right now because they’re not relevant to what I want to talk about) but he’s bang on the money (no pun intended) with this piece.

I shan’t reiterate Kuchera’s points here — read the feckin’ article! — but I will say that on this note, I do agree with him.

The Internet’s (and tech in general’s) reliance on advertising has to end. It’s not sustainable. It simply isn’t. And in the meantime, all it’s doing is devaluing content, pissing people off and causing us to continually circle the plughole, drawing ever closer to being sucked into oblivion forever, or at the very least into that weird, disgusting black smelly goo we found in the end of the pipe the last time our sink got blocked.

Whenever a site like, say, Kotaku (who are usually the ones who get picked on for this sort of thing, but they’re far from the only offenders) posts some bullshit story that gets everyone riled up about how irrelevant/pointless/offensive it is, the war cry that goes up is that they’re doing it “for the hits”. More accurately, as Kuchera says, they’re doing it for the pageviews, because like it or not, the bullshit stories that make everyone angry are the ones that lots of people take a look at “just to see what the fuss is about”. The Daily Mail makes a living from posting this sort of garbage on a daily basis; Kotaku at least punctuates its rubbish with some interesting and thought-provoking pieces, while the Mail is just uninterrupted crap. As Kuchera notes, though, the bullshit more often than not pays for the interesting and thought-provoking pieces.

It’s not just professionally-written content that suffers from this problem, though. Look at Facebook and the idiotic, illiterate ads that festoon its sidebar on every page. Look at Facebook (again) and its obnoxious, obtrusive “Sponsored Posts” thrusting themselves in your face uninvited. Look at Twitter and its “Promoted Tweets” that you don’t want to see. Look at whatever bullshit ad WordPress has decided to serve up underneath my writing on this site (although only on the mobile site, seemingly) Look at the mobile app I reviewed today, which rammed two full-screen ads down my throat before I could even open the main menu, and two more when I started picking a photo from my device’s photo library to manipulate. (I was not kind to said app in the review.) Look at the ads you get for casinos and shady-sounding “download services” any time you browse for porn or torrents or anything else you wouldn’t admit to looking for in polite company, but which we all know everyone looks for. (Yes, even you, you pervert.)

Internet advertising isn’t positive or helpful. It is, for the most part, shady, misleading, obnoxious and obtrusive. Which is, of course, why it’s so understandable that so many people — particularly the tech-savvy among us — run ad-blockers and thus deprive many sites of what little revenue they are scraping in from these revolting blights on the otherwise awesome nature of the Internet’s global community.

I don’t run ad-blockers. Honestly, this isn’t for any particularly noble reason — I simply haven’t set one up. But knowing what I know of the online publishing industry from the inside, I don’t intend to run one, either. Those “One Weird Tip to Peel Your Skin Off and Whiten Your Teeth in the Casino that One Weird Old Florida Mum Found While Downloading Now!!” ads are many sites’ main means of income. This isn’t the magazine industry — there’s no “cover price”; no newsagent looking over your shoulder and asking rather bluntly “you gonna buy that, mate?” (The magazine industry is, of course, in decline, meaning its model isn’t necessarily particularly desirable either — but what do you think damaged it beyond repair in the first place?)

It’s clear that this situation has to change. But it’s not going to be an easy process. Readers used to consuming content for free and blocking ads are going to have to suck it up and start paying for their content. Content creators need to be confident enough in their work to make it worth paying for. And those responsible for the sort of bullshit ads you see on the Internet every single day… well, frankly they need to find a new career, because they’ve done more than enough damage to the media biz already.

If things don’t change, there are going to be big problems down the line. Whether these problems take the form of the entire “new media” industry turning into the most stupid parts of your Facebook News Feed over and over again or the business collapsing entirely remains to be seen — but I’d rather not see either of those things happen if at all possible.