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.
