You know people complain about the ads on here?

I don’t normally read news apart from BBC, but got baited by my phone.

Incomprehensible to my tiny mind that this is the world we live in right now, where this is a mainstream newspaper.

(I’d already closed the video advert at the top but another just popped up straight away)

Awful

You can’t read the independent website without accepting the adverts or paying a subscription to the website to access it without adverts. If you refuse adverts/cookies then you have no access.

I’m perfectly happy not accessing the website

Oh well, we can all just get our news off some bloke shouting at a camera on YouTube / some person ranting on Facebook / some person reviewing a bike on YouTube that they were sent for free.

Then we can go have a riot to vent

this is the death spiral of traditional journalism. Ad splashes like that are certainly not helping the cause of trad journalism, but it’s a symptom rather than a cause.

rich right wingers buying up what’s left of real journalism will not help.

for what it’s worth I pay a subscription to be part of the tofu-eating guardian reading wokerati, and I also pay a licence fee to listen to radio 4 amongst other services. They won’t last in their current state though. I particularly miss local journalism of any reasonable quality.

to be part of the tofu-eating guardian reading wokerati

I’m in on that.   It’s not perfect but a lot better than most rags.

I’ve actually given up on Radio 4 – it all got too argumentative and crap and irritating  for my liking (not like the proper questioning of old like from Eddie Mair, John Humphries, James Naughtie).  I’ve actually ended up listening to Times Radio for current affairs. Yes its a bit right of centre but I can filter that, and it generally seems far more intelligent, discusses things properly rather than jumping around constantly like R4, and just less antagonistic.  Certainly not any kind of apologists for the flustercuck of the last 7 or 8 years of Tory corruption and incompetence.

Similar for R2 – virtually all the presenters just annoy me these days.  Jo Wiley back with her own decent show in the eve was OK, but little else.  Commercialised Planet Rock for me now.

Can’t stand local radio on the whole.  I don’t give a terhoss about hearing about Mrs Slocombe and her pussy being manhandled by a fireman when stuck up a tree in the local park.

(I’ll listen to R Leicester for the rugby commentary when there’s a Tigers game on, but that’s it).

@robertajobb – fellow Tiger here. {Fist bump emoji} Here’s hoping for better season than last. COYT.

Local papers are the same.  Unreadable.

Luckily in the case of ours they’re also not worth reading except for the odd update on major roadworks.

Road cc is another one that suffers.

I genuinely don’t understand it.

If I arranged for a load of chuggers to stand outside my shop door pestering my customers, I’d soon have no customers coming in.

It’s ludicrous!  I subscribe to the Graun for the same reasons tho, you need to support what you want to keep.

I’ve actually given up on Radio 4 – it all got too argumentative and crap and irritating  for my liking

Same here – I could never get on board with the morning politics stuff, just felt really juvenile. And the 6pm comedy is really weak! Sometimes there’s some interesting stuff in the daytime but I’m usually working.

My rant was largely informed by just having listened to the media show on radio 4. If you wanna go back and listen to yesterdays (Wednesday 11th sep) media show it’s pretty good and covers social media vs traditional media, and touches on the riots.

Oh well, we can all just get our news off some bloke shouting at a camera on YouTube

Which is full of ads as well.

Spain has a case going through the courts where refusal to accept cookies means no access to a site.

Enshitification in full swing.

It’s going to get worse before it gets better.

I have a PressReader subscription that I get for free through my local library – I can download and read many newspapers and magazines onto my device, including the Independent – all ad free

Spain has a case going through the courts where refusal to accept cookies means no access to a site.

A lot of the Spanish sites now give you the choice of either accepting cookies, or paying a subscription. Or being refused entry, of course.

I have a PressReader subscription that I get for free through my local library – I can download and read many newspapers and magazines onto my device, including the Independent – all ad free

My vote for best post of the day. I’ve just taken a few seconds to register online for a library card.

As an aside – taking a free trial of NewsGuard is an interesting exercise – its a browser extension that validates the authenticity of news sites – its getting more and more common that people land on news pages from Social Media or some form of aggregator rather than being a user of a particualr news outlet. Newsguard indicates whether news sources are bonafide – not just on the page itself but identifies news sources in search results and on social media feeds. What’s particularly interesting is they are completely transparent about how they operate so for any given outlet they publish a sort of ‘Nutritional Label’ about how they’ve assessed the publisher – transparency or otherwise  about owneshiip and funding, truthfulness and an how clearly they address errors and mistakes and so on. Makes for interesting reading even for sources you regularly use and trust.  Would make for far more interesting reading used in conjunction with something like Pressreader where you are browsing across numerous publishers.

An interesting new departure for them is working to guard against AI drawing on poor journalistic sources – so AI services have some sort of benchmark (if they can be bothered) as to the validity of the sources they feed into their desperately grim slop-engines. So a free trial is illuminating, a subsrcription is probably a worthy act

Google, Facebook and so on are all supposed to be verifying the newsources serve up but they are completely opaque about how they do it, both in terms of criteria and the amount of effort they make to apply them. Their argument is if they revealed their system people would game that system. Newsguard show all their working right down to who makes each assessment and when. Their argument is the way to game their system is to responsibly publish good, honest journalism  – so go ahead and game it 🙂

NewsGuard

Incomprehensible to my tiny mind that this is the world we live in right now, where this is a mainstream newspaper.

It hasn’t been a proper newspaper for years, I try to avoid it personally.

As above, local newspaper websites are notoriously ridden with shonky adverts and pop-ups. And funnily enough they have a lot in common with STW in terms of their predicament.

If I arranged for a load of chuggers to stand outside my shop door pestering my customers, I’d soon have no customers coming in.

What if your shop gave away your product for free / at a loss, but the chuggers gave you 50% of their income for the priviledge of standing at your door?

Newspaper sites, national and local both, have been notoriously bad for adverts for years.  I accidentally clicked on a link to The Sun the other day, fortunately they wanted me to pay to remove adverts and view the content so that was a lucky escape.

I don’t know exactly how, I have my main browser secured pretty tightly, but I’ve never seen an advert on YouTube on the desktop.  It came as quite a shock when I was viewing it on the TV instead.

I don’t know exactly how, I have my main browser secured pretty tightly, but I’ve never seen an advert on YouTube on the desktop.  It came as quite a shock when I was viewing it on the TV instead.

Google have in the past run experiments to see what the effect / benefit / tolerance for adverts is on their services uses by not serving ads and sponsored content to one in every thousand users. The idea was to monitor how behaviour differred between users either with our withouts ads being served –  They set the trial running…… then forgot about it so although the trials was running for years they weren’t actually  looking at any of the results. They only realised it was still running when users who were part of that 1:1000 cohort who’d paid for google ads complained their service didn’t get promoted to them when they did a vanity search.

When they did look at the data they saw (what they decided) was user experience being improved by adverts because users who were served ads spent more time on google than those who weren’t. Which was a very generous (to themselves) conclusion to draw. The reality is advertising degrades the search results meaning users have to spend more time trying to find the information they are actually looking for. In reality googles ads are paid for twice, once for the advertiser and once by employers who’s employees time is wasted by poor search results and therefore having to spend more time searching for the information they need

So, anyway,  you maybe one of those lucky ad free guinea pigs

That being the case, I’d have seen the same experience on the TV?  Unless they’re doing it per-device rather than per-account I suppose.