A couple of days ago the people responsible for our commenting system enabled a new “revenue” system. Sadly, as I’ve not kept up with all my mail, this was enabled on Coolsmartphone without our approval. It seems to be something they’re doing with multiple sites without them having the chance to agree to it.
In the last few weeks I’ve seen a lot of promotional activity pushing this new “monetization and revenue generation system” but haven’t enabled it because, put simply, it’s cr*p. You’ve probably seen the sort of adverts at the bottom of posts on local newspaper websites. Usually they’re carried by a company called Taboola. They specialise in putting click-bait articles on the bottom and side of newspaper sites, blog sites and everything in-between. They look like this..
As I mentioned in our stance on ad-blocking, this sort of stuff really grinds my gears. Sure, advertising has to go somewhere – things have to be paid for, but I’d rather have understated, well-behaved and appropriate ads. This is just utter tat.
If we’re to have websites pushing ads like this, then I can understand why Three is looking to block ads. Go and look at the Sentinel newspaper website. It’s a local publication from Stoke-on-Trent and you’ll find everything that’s pushing people into ad-blockers. There’s overlays, floating ads, full-page ads and those ads that appear and then extend out just when you weren’t expecting them.
So I’m not having it. We’ve disabled and cancelled all of these click-bait ads under the stories. Apologies all. No more of this. If you see anything still appearing like this, do let me know.
