Every time I use a web browser without an ad blocker I'm surprised at how shitty the web experience is.
If somebody is giving your users a 2nd-class experience, and you control the pipes, shouldn't you punish them?
Getting initial traction using free stuff and then introducing ads or other revenue streams later once you're big enough is pretty much the dominant business model online today, unless you are a vendor of real products or services for which you charge real money in return.
this is fundamentally different from the usual ad-supported website because the quantity of ads is consistent across all users.
it's a clever dark pattern IMO.
(edit below)
it has to do with the amount of value inherent to the value proposition. you can try to exact more value from a product and potentially degrade the experience as a result. that's legal because it's a competitive business decision, but at some point you misrepresent the value of the product you are offering my changing the experience too much.
its a hazy line to draw because I think in the OP, the user may not have minded a couple ads, but rather they were annoyed by the inundation of too many ads to the point where you can't experience the actual value proposition of the article. then it becomes "spam".
it is not sufficient to deem this as just another business practice. there are obviously "working" business models such as Ponzi schemes that are highly illegal.
It's also not at all unreasonable, again IMHO, for a site that didn't start with ads but suddenly receives an abnormally high level of traffic to introduce ads at that time. Someone has to pay the hosting bills, after all.
A better bet if this mechanism is being abused might be to establish some sort of standard whereby a link could include a checksum that would then be invalidated if the linked content subsequently changed. This way, anyone following the link (including any hosting sites that share that link) could confirm whether or not what they were seeing was what was originally linked. You could take this further with some sort of standardised changelog and last updated indicator that sites could make available if they wanted to, and having browsers that detected a mismatch in a checksummed link warn a user before displaying the page and include recent update information if the site provided it. Lots of details would need working out, though, and I'm not sure I see enough upside to justify the complexity and inconvenience.
also there's no explicit contract of delivery here, a headline alone doesn't confer that.
It's fucking douchebaggery though.
There's also "reader mode" browser features.
Advertising must die.
I've been seeing ads that get through uBlock Origin in the last few days. Just a couple, I haven't bothered investigating it.
This has the added bonus of not expecting the reader to come back to the article multiple times to ensure that they receive the latest
Wonder if they could do something similar, cache the current contents of the page.
The very thought makes me shudder.
Good thanks
Click the same direct image link from Facebook (Messenger in my example) and it'll redirect you to its full fat ad loaded page at best, at worst it'll just redirect you to its iOS/Android app listing with no way of actually seeing the damn image you clicked
The spammers are getting really savvy about it too. I recently read an article in my feed that was interesting and funny, so I shared it. The next day my wife asked me why I shared that garbage site, and when I looked at it on her phone the formatting was completely different. It was now a 10 page article with a mess of ads and a paragraph or two of text on each page.
They created some decent content with a catchy headline. Then they seeded it out on social media and waited until it had "gone viral" before they crammed it full of shitty ads.