Lev Lazinskiy

How Advertising Ruined the Internet

I would like to think of the Internet as a wonderful resource that can be used to propagate the spread of information, knowledge, ideas, and provide a medium in which the whole world can connect to each other. In many ways the Internet does fulfill this idealistic information highway. But, at the same time it is also a disgusting capitalistic mind fu**ing advertisement machine that floods your brain with so much garbage that attempting to find useful content without stumbling upon useless links, flashing photographs of penis enlargers, or a big yellow-purple blinking block telling you that you just won an ipad due to the fact that you are the 1,000,000th visitor to the website becomes a frustrating experience.

This is precisely my issue with capitalism as a whole. I don’t know about you, but for me personally the goal in life is not to make money. Making a profit, selling my soul to google ads to make 15cents a click, or flooding my blog/website/twitter feed with useless advertisement will not make me feel like I have accomplished something in life. I do not think that a successful website should be based on the amount of add revenue that it generates, instead it should be based on the content that it provides.

This is exactly why you will never see a single advertisement on any website that I own, manage or maintain. It is the lowest form of “web design” and I am personally against the whole idea of advertisements. I will not sell my soul to amazon associates, or google ads, or any other similar company for that matter.

Now, before people begin to call me a hypocrite, I would like to make one thing clear. Yes, I have used ads in previous blogs (look at me talking like I have actual readers, its cute (= ) but those were only in place for a very small amount of time (5 days) and I don’t know what I was thinking. I thought it would be nice to make a little bit of extra cash on the side and what harm could it do? But, after seeing my site with the ads, I feel like the website lost a lot of its personality. A blog, to me, is more than just a piece of the web. It grows with you, meets new people with you, in a way it is a part of you. Now imagine how it would feel if Speedway or Audible.com decided to come to your house one day and tape a huge “skyscraper” ad on the left side of your face?

That is how I felt when I had ads, and I immediately took them off. After using the Internet for such a long period of time - I do not regret that decision and I truly hope that other people will begin to understand that having advertisements takes much more away from your website than it adds.

And if I am the only person who feels this way, then so be it. To each his own.