[wordup] I know, paid advertisements on independent websites, who fucking cares.

[Adam Shand]

From: http://oblivio.com/road/03101101.shtml

11 October 2003 | Train

I hesitate to mention this, it’s such a small thing, just a bit of 
passing landscape seen from the window of the train. It’s about paid 
advertisements on independent websites and how much I hate them and how 
several people I respect are putting such ads on their sites and how 
this saddens me.

I know, paid advertisements on independent websites, who fucking cares.

It’s just that I feel oppressed and sickened by the avalanche of 
billboard ads and subway ads and magazines ads and newspaper ads and 
radio ads and television ads and product placements and Internet ads and 
ads on the bus and subway and in cabs and on clothing (how did they fool 
us into that one?) and sometimes even ads written across the sky.

I won’t try to convince you that capitalism is death. Either you believe 
this or you don’t, and in any case the sun will still rise tomorrow and 
capitalism will remain death.

Instead I want to tell a story.

Four years ago I read Paul Ford’s Ftrain for the first time and fell in 
love. What amazed me about Ftrain, aside from Paul’s writing, was that 
it was free. In fact the whole web was free, and not all of it sucked. 
People as gifted as Paul Ford were publishing online with no other 
motive than to be read and perhaps convince a few unsuspecting souls to 
want to sleep with them.

It seemed a sort of paradise. Nothing to buy, nothing to sell. Of course 
it’s become a muddled sort of paradise over time, as Paul Ford now uses 
Ftrain to advertise his availability for work. I do the same, and it’s 
at the point where most of my clients learn about me via Oblivio. Is my 
“Hire This Man” link an advertisement? Yes, and yet I consider this 
quite different from the paid Google ads that have been showing up on 
popular independent websites of late, the sort of ads that bring a 
dollar or more per click.

I talked about this recently with a friend who edits such a site. He 
said what I expected him to say, which is that it takes a lot of time to 
produce a decent website and that no one is paying him to do it.

It’s hard to argue with this. I average about twenty hours a week on 
Oblivio. I try to make it good. No one is paying me. If someone offered 
me money to write it, I’d take that money in a heartbeat.

But paid ads, however you cut them and for whatever reason you accept 
them, are gross. It’s gross to see ads appearing in places where none 
had existed. It’s gross to be served up “targeted” links to products and 
services and to know that what’s driving this supposed bit of 
helpfulness is money.

My friend pointed out that no large-scale print publication could 
survive without advertising revenue, and that, like it or not, this is 
the direction the web is going. Again he’s right. But being right 
doesn’t make it right, nor make me like it.

When people say the Internet is maturing, what they really mean is that 
it’s opening its legs to capitalism, or that capitalism is finally 
figuring out how to make it into a thing with a hole and legs that spread.

I don’t mean to call my friend a sell-out. Selling-out is at best a 
matter of degree these days. But this particular loss runs deep for me 
because of what these sites, and this form, have meant to me.

Like I say, just a bit of passing landscape. Take it for what it’s worth.

The train rolls on.