Nowadays, everybody wants a monthly fee for nearly everything you can think of, either to buy access to some service, or to keep something annoying from happening that didn’t used to happen, such as having ads start appearing everywhere you look on the ‘net and on pretty much every service you use.
I feel a little like Yosemite Sam saying “Back Off,” but I refuse to pay a monthly fee simply to keep ads from appearing along with my posts, when they didn’t in the past. In and of themselves ads are intrusive and irritating — they’re trying to catch your attention. The ads have their own colors and visual style, ones that clash with my sites. Worse, since the particular ads you see are selected by a computer using keywords and in other non-human-considered ways, ads promulgating the exact opposite of what I may advocate, feel or think can easily appear with my posts, especially when the posts are viewed singly.
I do understand the need to fund development and upkeep. However, the “put up with the ads we’ve now put everywhere vs. pay to keep the ads off” route is not a good way to do this, to my mind. After all, you put the ads in, and then told me I could pay you to keep them from appearing. Trendy, perhaps, and done more and more often today, but not exactly friendly-feeling.
In the abstract, I’m willing (maybe — let’s see the terms of the deal) to pay a small amount as a regular user of your service, either monthly or, better, annually) to see that you stay in business under reasonable conditions. After all, I’ve got a certain investment in your keeping my previous posts available on the blog sites I’ve set up. Even with good archiving of blog copy, I’d find it a bigger job than I’d like to re-create the run elsewhere.
But putting ads all over the place well after I’ve put lots of posts into an initially free – and ad-free — blogging service, and then, afterwards, saying if I don’t want the ads, I can pay you a monthly fee to keep them off, feels like something a bit different to me.
For all I know, many people may not mind viewing ads wherever they look on the internet, whether they are text-only ads with links or animated ads or even video-based ads. Others, those who view my newly-added posts on RSS feeds, may not even have to see any ads at all. I DO mind the ads that are now infesting the net everywhere you look. I don’t want to have to find and click the ‘close’ button on the ad before I can read the material I came to the site to see, which so often is located carefully right under the ad window.
I dislike seeing the ads on my blog sites very much, not least because I’ve set up and designed my blog sites to be simple and visually attractive — I’m not merely an RSS-item generating station, although one or two readers prefer to view my blog pieces using that functionality — but rather I offer a consciously chosen visual experience when you view the entire blog site, as I really would like you to do. OK, as overwhelming aesthetic experiences go, compared to, say, viewing the Pietà or the David up close, my blog sites are no big deal, but each offers a certain atmosphere that enhances the content of the blog pieces.
At least, I find it so, and I hope both my readers (the non-RSS ones, at least) do, too.
So, for now, I’m putting up with the ads, because I don’t want to have to pay merely to keep them off. But, when a notice comes from me that a new blog post is available, you may choose to visit the link to the general blog site where the newest post appears at the top (links to the sites are posted handily in the signature of the emails) to minimize what looks to me very much like advertising pollution.
As I remember the scene, one character in an episode on the second season of The Wire points out “We used to make things ourselves in this country. Now we just take money out of each other’s pockets.” If those aren’t the exact words, that’s exactly their gist.
I think he’s got a point.
