Mildly spicy web advertising takes
* 468x60 static non-animated non-tracking banners for cool webcomics and weird hobby blogs are brilliant and only the most tedious of people have any problem with them at all
* blog writers and webcomic artists getting paid a couple bucks here and there for running non-intrusive ads is Good Actually
* the shittiness of web ads scales exponentially in accordance with how much money you're trying to make off them - if you want a few extra quid each month for pizza and beer money, web ads are great and useful to everyone, that's the perfect use case; if you want more money than that then ads are the wrong tool for the job, and you can in fact use the wrong tool wrong enough to destroy democracy
Edit: one more
* the fact that my adblocker will look at a 468x60 non-animated non-intrusive non-spyware banner ad for a gay webcomic and go "ah yes, this can go in the same hole as this 50 megabyte video ad for a toothbrush you bought last week, loaded with so much spyware javascript that your processor fan roars like a jet engine," by DEFAULT, is... honestly tragic. These are Different Things but, remember the most tedious people in the world I mentioned above? They made the adblocker
A reminder, I am that pissed off with the kind of horrific web advertising that google and facebook put out that I'm giving ad space away for free on Improbable Island, check it https://www.improbableisland.com/hobbysites.php
(image description: three screenshots of banner ads I'm serving on Improbable Island, there's too many to describe properly but it's a riot of colour and text advertising webcomics, indie games, weird blogs and basically it's what you'd expect to see if you asked Fedi to come up with banner ads)
@ifixcoinops It just occurred to me how wild it is that 468x60 banner ads that were expected to span a good width of the page in the 90s are just a bit of a tight fit on a sidebar for 1080p displays
