alt Hacker NewsMaybe I'm just getting old, but I've gotten tired of these "Journalists shouldn't try to make their living by finding profitable ads, they should just put in ads that look pretty but pay almost nothing and supplement their income by working at McDonalds" takes.
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I'm pretty sure people would read more and click on more ads if they didn't have to endure waiting for 49 MB of crap and then navigating a pop-up obstacle course for each article.
If the ad-tech sausage factory needs 49MB of JS for a clickbait article, that is not "earning" a living. They are just externalizing costs to users and ISPs. You can defend the hustle, but the scale of waste here is cartoonish.
If you need a CDN and half a browser runtime just to show 800 words about celebrity nonsense, the business model is broken. Everyone else is footing the bandwidth bill for nonsense they never asked to recieve.
In the case of the New York Times, they have subscriptions and many are willing to pay for their work - but their subscriptions are not ad-free.
49MB or homelessness? There is surely other options.
This argument is valid if journalism was actually journalism instead of just ripping off trending stories from HN and Reddit and rehashing it with sloppy AI and calling it a day and putting in 4 lines of text buried inside 400 ads.
> Journalists shouldn't try to make their living by finding profitable ads
I mean, they can absolutely try. That doesn't mean they should succeed.
Well, I'm going to block the ads anyway (or just leave), so if they're trying to find profitable ads, they may need to revise their strategy.