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WordPress Carpet-Bombing Ads and a Plea

Jessica Davidson

Recently you may have noticed that WordPress has started to put an insane number of adverts on this site – and every other blog with a free plan. I understand the commercial imperative but seriously doubt that carpet-bombing pages with ads creates a higher click rate. Not only that, but the adverts are shitty too – clickbait nonsense pitched so low it reeks of desperation. They’re not even grammatically correct!

This specimen was on a post about love and mysticism on one of my other blogs.

I was happy to live with the ads before because they weren’t too intrusive and only appeared at the end of a post and in the sidebar. But now they’re inserting them into the body of the text after every third paragraph. Some of my posts are quite long (sorry!) so I’ve counted up to 12 ads in one post – all identical and all stupid!

The upshot of this little rant is that I’ll be upgrading the site sooner than I had planned. I was going to do it later this year when I renew my domain mapping, but I can’t live with the ugly (and pointless) intrusions that long. So I’m asking for your help…

If you enjoy my ramblings, please consider making a small donation to support my work and help to purge the horrible ads from this site. You can PayPal Me or hit the button below – thank you!

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BTW, if the ads annoy you, log in to make them disappear. It’s magic!

Update: this is typical! The day after posting this, I noticed the ads had disappeared from the body of the text on all three of my blogs. WordPress maintains that they never include ads within the text so I don’t know what caused the problem. I only realised it was happening because I noticed ads on another WordPress blog and then found the same problem on mine. Weird.

Update May 2nd: Well, the ads are back in the middle of the posts. I’ve now discovered that this is deliberate – according to this post on the Forums: “I’ve heard back from our ads team, and it appears these ads are intentional, and a new ad unit we’re rolling out on free and WordAds sites.” Great. I’ll be upgrading this site very soon, but I now need to rethink my other blogs…

 

10 thoughts on “WordPress Carpet-Bombing Ads and a Plea”

  1. I just noticed WordPress also embeds RevenueStripe ads in the notification emails you get if you follow a blog or comment thread. A little research revealed that one of RevenueStripe’s biggest clients is the PAC set up to fund Tea Party candidates in the US.

    Seems we’re keeping good company. Not.

    I wonder if paying the WordPress ransom also exempts your followers from emailed ads. I wonder if it protects you from the same ads emailed from blogs you follow.

    Liked by 1 person

  2. This is interesting. I recently upgraded to the first level of payment for the same reason. Mike makes a good point though by talking about the effect of Uranus in Taurus. Claiming ownership (at least to some level) of our own little corner of the internet is a way of grounding the Uranian energy of the internet and making it work for us in our own terms (at least to a degree).

    Liked by 2 people

  3. Yeah, I’ve been teetering at the brink of quitting WordPress for over a year now because of the ads. The fact there were none was part of my original reason for choosing WordPress and I feel a bit like a boiled frog after watching them slowly creeping into my posts in ever increasing numbers.

    Yeah, I appreciate WP has to make a buck for it’s service but I’m implacably opposed to the whole consumerist enterprise that advertising and marketing is the banal face of and hate that I’m now facilitating it (in a way other than the usual portion of my purchases going towards shoving the products in my face). If my view of karma was simplistic enough I might blame myself for accepting ad industry money during my IT days,

    Paying to upgrade my site isn’t an option. If there’s one thing worse than marketing business models it’s the ones where you have to pay for the privilege of avoiding it. The Black Mirror episode Fifteen Million Merits is just one of several speculative dystopias I know in which that model has taken over the economy.

    I’m still procrastinating about quitting WordPress but in the meantime your post has prompted me to do what I’ve been considering for a while and put links to adblockers on my blog though I’ve discovered it can be tricky blocking the ads without disabling other WordPress functions such as commenting and likes. Of course the links themselves are just another form of advertising, but one that appeals to my sense of irony.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Yes, indeed – it’s a Procrustean nightmare and the alternatives aren’t much better. It’s either a case of spending time and money on your own site (which makes sense, but I don’t have the time, money or programming ability to do that), or switch to another site where you encounter the exact same dilemma. Unless you go to Blogger – but that’s owned by Google. We’re trapped in our own web…

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      1. I think this is totally the Taurean transit right here. Ownership.

        The next decade is going to define “how” and “what” we can own in technology. There will be debates about privacy when the “cloud” starts to storm, which is going to happen in due due.

        Yeah, the cloud of data that all these strangers own all over the world. I am not paranoid since we all live in the same ocean, but as individuals, its time to take your power back, or at least as much as you can get back from the “cloud”.

        Getting everybody linked to SAS (Software as Service) was for the advertisement angle, they thought about this years ago. Heh, now it’s starting to sink into people that these people car nothing about helping them with a blog, it’s about the money.

        That imagine inside your Love post, shows just how evil “the cloud” really is.

        Liked by 1 person

  5. Agreed, its the state of the earth unfortunately right now.

    I am a dev since 1998 on the net and seriously Jessica, it is not that much to have your own server/account and install WP. It’s easy to maintain.

    Than you can do the no adds if you really wanted to. 🙂 I know, I know but you know the story, if it’s too good to be true… You need your own space, then your are independent.

    What is Uranus in Taurus for you? HAHA Get ownership of your technology, I think I am really going to love what Uranus has in store for Taurus the next 8 years.

    Mike

    Liked by 1 person

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