Great article by Felix Salmon in The Guardian today about how advertising technology is ruining the online experience, particularly on news sites.
There is something wonderfully easy about reading a column in a physical - i.e. printed - newspaper. Without constantly being bombarded, distracted, and obstructed by digital advertising of all kinds, some of it obvious, some of it not.
Traditional advertising banners on websites (i.e. those that sit nicely in a corner of an online page where you never have to look) don't work very well any more, because hardly anyone clicks on them or pays them any notice.
So now, online publishers (including the Guardian's own site, ironically) use a huge number of often quite underhand techniques to fool us into looking at, and reading, gibberish content by online advertisers.
Worst are perhaps are the 'advertorials', i.e. advertising features, that masquerade as editorial. All the main news sites in the UK use this trick. On the Guardian's site, they are headlined "More stories from around the web". On the Telegraph.co.uk they are called 'Promoted stories'. And on the Dailymail.co.uk, they are called just "From the Web".
But the point that Felix Salmon also makes is that the hidden advertising on these sites is serving to slow down the whole experience of using the web.
By contrast, the great advantage with printed news media, is that advertisements in newspapers work in a complementary way, sitting alongside editorial unobtrusively. Readers who want to look at the advertising, do so. Those who don't, can easily ignore it. No one is offended by it. But enough readers pay the ads enough attention for the advertisers to get a good return on their investment. And everybody wins.
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