I’ve spoken about this topic before, but this is a parallel thought.
Whenever I click onto a link which leads me to a PJMedia outlet, I’m often / always confronted with a message blocking the article, said message requiring me to turn off my ad-blocking software before I may proceed.
Uh, no. To quote Dubya, “Nahguhdoodat.” It’s not that I have anything against advertisements, per se — hell, I’ve worked in the ad agency business myself, and I know that ad revenues help media companies remain in business. What I object to, with a screaming passion, is that digital ads don’t just announce, they shout at me and intrude on my reading with pop-ups, loud audio and all sorts of other bullshit. And let’s not talk about ads which have tracking software built in, which leads to all sorts of unpleasantness and bastardy down the track.
Side note: To be frank, I also don’t want to be led to other ads which “relate” to any specific product in which I might show an interest. Fucking Amazon’s “if you bought this, you might also be interested in this” trope heads the list, but other websites — e.g. Bud’s Guns FFS — also perpetrate this nonsense, even when my interest in, say, a .22 Beretta pistol generates a “suggested list” which includes a Glock 17 and Bergara rifle.
Anyway, I’m not interested in “allowing” ads into my reading of news items, thank you very much, because my indulgence does not extend to being abused by the advertisers. So fuck you.
Now there are ways to sidestep this little device. The one I use the most is to Ctrl-X the link, and in the blank thus created, type in “archive.is/” and then CTRL-V the original link and hit enter. This generally leads to a page like this:
Click on the blue link, and voilà! you get the article:
Now some websites have found ways to confound this method or the alternative archiving software products, in which case I do something radical.
I just close the page and OMG forget reading about the topic altogether, in that form. Why?
There is no topic in the news that is so important.
PJMedia is not the only culprit, of course: it seems as though almost every “newspaper” has created a PPV setup on the basis of: “if we can’t derive income from ads, we’ll have to get the moolah from membership.”
Fair enough, I concede the point. It always made sense back in the old print media days, but even then there were work-arounds. Buying a magazine each week for $1.25 gets spendy — so the print companies made insanely-discounted offers such as “Get two years’ worth of magazines for only 25c per edition if you pay $6!”
And yes, the magazine contained ads — but those ads didn’t require you to read them before you could turn the fucking page, which is largely what digital media requires.
Finally, let me be completely honest about this. If I’m going to pay to read a publication of some sort, my polymathic nature demands that I don’t confine myself to a single topic, unless it’s a topic I’m insanely interested in. It’s why for many years I had subs to Gun Tests, G&A and the like. (I also had a sub for TIME magazine, back before they became irretrievably leftoid, because they carried articles on lots of topics, not just political ones.)
But if I’m going to pay for a daily read, I want the publication to contain topics on just about every topic — and this is where Breitbart News and PJMedia fail, because there it’s 90% politicspoliticspolitics — and politics only constitutes about 40% of my interests.
And to be brutally frank, finding out someone’s guess about Georgia’s next senator is woefully insufficient for me to consider paying for the privilege.
Even more to the point, Redstate‘s top 6 articles have so little interest to me that I’m not going to bother opening any of them, regardless of whether there’s a paywall / ad unblocking demand involved.
Okay, #3 might be sorta interesting but hell, we all know that the Democrats aren’t going to give an attaboy to the good guy with a gun, so why bother?
So that’s why I do the digital sidestep. And if the sidestep is eventually completely blocked, well then fukkem: I’ll just go to the range or watch an unblocked video on why military pistols don’t matter. Way more fun.
I completely agree. However I keep forgetting the archive website so if I can’t read an article I just move on to something else.
Same here. Forgot the archive link.
The pop-ups and blockers things are wearing me out.
I have several pop up blockers installed but they seem to do nothing….
AdBlock couldn’t do anything about those ridiculous ads from Hyundai on Insty, and others from the same “agency”.
I’ve used Ghostery for quite some time, but it lets things through here and there, as well as getting those paywall popups from time to time to boot.
More recently I found that “uBlock Origin Lite” seems to work best for me in both a) blocking ads and b) not getting detected by those pesky paywall popups.
would the library offer any better access to these websites?
I use the Brave browser and I go to a lot of PJM sites. What are these “ads” of which you speak?
I have a novel idea.
Why don’t the news guys print their news and ads on large sheets of paper that a kid leaves on my porch every morning (or evening, their choice).
They can charge me a fair price for this service and I can use the old paper to clean guns on. The kid has a job and learns to work. The news guys get their ad money.
Everybody wins.
The same methods apply to circumventing paywalls.
Also, some search engines provide archived or cached links that might be useful for bypassing these blockers. I used one against a paywalled Blaze article yesterday; the full text had already been picked up by the Internet Archive, so the archive link sent me there.
I’ve found that if you “refresh” the page about a dozen times, you’ll finally get a new “page” with an “X” in the Upper RH corner. Click that, the block goes away, and the “paywalled” text can be read.
I noticed Taki started doing this too. I was a pretty regular reader of said site.
I can’t blame them, they deserve to pay their columnists, and get paid themselves. I really have no grounds to bellyache when my freebie dries up (hello welfare recipients).
But I’m of a same mind as you. There’s just not enough of interest for me in what Taki has, to outweigh the bullshit, so I move along.
You remember paying $6 for a year’s subscription to a weekly news magazine? Wake up and smell the inflation. Every one of the weeklies was always crap, at least for the last fifty years, yet now you want a similar service for free and still without ads? It is easy enough to eliminate the ads by paying the equivalent of the old subscription fee adjusted for inflation. Just like back in those olden days, a subscription model requires the reader to choose which publications are worth the price, so I don’t know which ones you would choose.
It is still annoying to follow a link to an article only to find it is behind a paywall. The most common way for me to run into that is either one of your links to Brit crap (near as I can tell anything currently published in Britain is garbage) or instapundit links to NYT, LA times, Etc.
Having followed your blogs for a couple of decades, I remember when you declined an invitation to get in on the start of PJMedia. So I wonder if your special annoyance about their somewhat successful growth might have just a little bit of sour grapes wrapped up in it.
I’ve had good luck disabling JavaScript on such sites.
Kim, thanks for the “archive.is/” solution, I’ll have to give it a go. Might just save some of the little sanity I have left.
Anoother thing that drives me batshit is going to PJ Media or Legal Insurrection, via Insty or someone else, and getting hit with a pop-up saying “Hey! Give us your email address and we’ll let you know when we post something new!” NOOOOOOOO! Never gonna happen. i’ve got enough shit in my email in box already. I don’t need ten emails a day from you!
And then there’s the site I go to to see if there’s something there I might like to buy, only to have a pop-up appear two bloody seconds after the site finishes loading asking for my email address and they’ll give me X % off my first purchase. Fer Fraks sake, I just got here, and haven’t had a chance to look around to see if you have anything worth my money. Sod off with the pop-ups! Ask me when I’m buying and ready to check out.
Ahhhhh. That rant felt good. Thank you.