Are books the only place nowadays where you're not BOMBARDED with ads?

I've recently changed radio stations in my car. I was listening to Radio Exe, but the sheer amount of ads on there is unbelievable. I'm now a Radio 2 enjoyer.

But it got me to thinking: Is an old fashioned regular-ass BOOK the only place we're not harassed by ads at every opportunity?

TV is just non stop ads, Youtube is ads nonstop, Twitch is probably the worst offender for them.

You go for a walk down the high street, and there's ads on bus stops, ads on the side of buses, banners all over the place. You read a magazine, and there's pages upon pages of ads.

I guess we're at that "Late Stage Capitalism" stage of our existence where abso-fucking-lutely EVERYTHING is monetised and jammed full of ads these days

Is a good old book the last refuge of the damned?

Don't worry! Thanks to "Kindle with special offers" there are ads in books in some circumstances now too!

To be fair books have always had ads in them too, in various forms including preview chapters for other books by the same author or publisher or just ads in the back of the book for other books by the publishers.

To be more serious...I think you're talking about media here because obviously you can just go out in nature and not be bombarded by ads...unless you count bird song as personal ads, which I guess is fair.

If you pay for streaming services there aren't a lot of ads unless you count ads for shows on the service (which is not really different than publishers putting ads for their other books in the front/back of a book.) I don't think Netflix really has ads at all other than those.

If you pay for Youtube Premium most videos won't have ads and you won't really see ads often. Sponsorships are still annoying but you don't et a lot of ads. I use Youtube music off my Premium and I don't think I have ever seen an ad on that, unless you count music suggestions.

So I wouldn't say books are the only places. The advantage of books is that it's much easier to skip the ads or whatever you don't like because of how they're formatted.

But overall in terms of media consumption I see MANY fewer ads than I did 20 years ago. TV used to be just chock full of ads but now with pay streaming services I don't even know what ad campaigns are big anymore. I remember when there were ad campaigns that penetrated into pop culture like the Budweiser "whassup" and "why ask why, try bud dry" campaigns, among others, but I can't think of a "viral" ad campaign in the recent past.

One of the reasons that ads seem so much more obtrusive in real life is that advertisers are desperate to get to an audience who is better than ever at avoiding them. You can pay for ad free streams and podcasts and the like.

To be fair I live in America, the land of ads, and in a big city that has always been full of ads everywhere, so you may just be experiencing the Americanization of your space, as Britain is in a lot of cultural aspects.

Everything with a screen either has or will have ads. It's too cheap and easy to do so, and with everything being a subscription, it works in two ways: blast your eyeballs with products AND push you to subscribe to end the frustration.

@sethmode: Screen and an Internet connection. There are lots of non networked things with screens but no ads. It's the Internet connection that makes it work. Otherwise the ads get stale quickly, and while you might still see some it's not nearly as valuable.

My TV started giving me ads while I played videos games. I was playing Control when in the corner a pop up for shoes showed up. I immediately killed its internet connection and only reconnect for firmware updates every few months.

I use Firefox and adblock and VPN to look like I’m in Europe. I refuse all cookies I can on every website I visit. I sub to nextlander and CBB world so I don’t have to hear ads just as much as for the exclusive content.

YouTube’s crackdown recently on ad blockers has led me to have to use chrome for YouTube videos, and there are like three ads every 10 minutes. Twitch forces me to watch 30 seconds of ads for live streams, but not for archives. Prime video pops one ad per episode of a show I watch. Some podcasts have the host read the ad, but that is what the 2 minute skip button is for. That’s about all I have to see, so I comparatively got it ok, and yet every ad enrages me. Particularly this YouTube and podcast automatic mid-roll ads that interrupt seemingly at random.

So yeah, I think books might me the last bastion, but when they inevitably fully phase out paper books, then I guarantee you mid-read pop ups will make an appearance.

Edit: the twitch ads are actually worse when I veer away from nextlander or remap. I was watching the MST3K 24/7 channel and they don’t time the ads for the commercial breaks, so you just end up missing a minute or two when the ads roll. I would guess it’s the same with other channels, though thankfully I don’t have much call to venture outside of my bubble on twitch.

I was going to say playing a video game is still a relatively ad free experience, but that's probably because my own interests don't align with the type of games that have a storefront or the entire mobile platform.

@brian_: There are zero modern consoles that you can turn on without seeing ads. The Switch is maybe less bad than the others but still full of ads. And of course the PC storefronts are stuffed with ads. If you can play a video game without seeing ads you are playing (certain) retro games (there were actually ads in lots of retro videogames too, depending on genre.)

spotify premium? though that won't save you if you're using it for podcasts. also depending how strict you are with the definition of ad- if you're including things like spotify promoting new features or artists- then that would eliminate it as well.

to be honest the only ads that are starting to drive me up the wall are podcast programmatic ads (hello, bombcast), twitch and youtube.

@bigsocrates: That's why I tried to be more specific and used the term "playing a video game". Once you get in the game, it's going to be relatively ad free, depending on the type of game. Ads, usually, aren't embedded into the game itself the same way they aren't, usually, embedded in books. But yeah, on the way there, you're probably going to see ads because consoles are storefronts too now. The same way you're probably going to see ads when you go to a bookstore to pick up a book.

@brian_: By that standard most movies and TV shows on streaming services or premium cable or whatever are ad free too though. And most premium music streaming. I can't think of a lot of subscription services that have those kinds of "in media" ads.

And of course even if you don't play sports games or racing games or other games with explicit ads there are ads in lots of games in other ways. Alan Wake the original had product placement, for example. And it's not super uncommon.

And I don't count going to a bookstore as part of the book experience the same way that booting up a console home screen is part of the game experience. You don't go to the bookstore every time you want to read a book, you can get books lots of ways without going to a bookstore (gifts, libraries, stealing them from children)

But if you want to play Balan Wonderworld (AND I KNOW YOU DO) you're going to have to see some ads every time you jump into your favorite game (Balan Wonderworld.) That's different.

@bigsocrates: I think product placement isn't uncommon in some of the biggest games out there, but if you're comparing it to all of every video game out there, I think it's pretty rare.

There are plenty of reasons why I'm not going to play Balan Wonderworld, but the reason I draw the distinction between game and console/storefront is because booting up a home screen isn't always a requirement to playing games either. I can just as easily, or made even easier, steal a video game via piracy as I could a book from a child and never have to engage with a storefront if that's the route we're going down. Or if we're going for a more legal route, use something like Itch. Once I've bought a game there, I don't have to boot up a storefront that plasters ads on my screen. I just load up the game from my files.

There's physical media and DRM-free media, but I don't know for how long. I feel increasingly cynical about the future to media, I'm afraid that we are already past the point of no return on them as they are being phased out. Studios will say that it's because of piracy, but we all know that the real reason is that they want to control every aspect of how you consume their product. If you watch a DVD at home, how can the poor studio know about it and monetize it?

I've resigned to the idea that every piece of media that is important to me has already been made. We have 100+ years of movies that are largely available in 4K if you're lucky, 1080p or 480p at worst, and I can just sustain the rest of my life on them. The same goes for music and games. It's not that I hate everything that's new but if I can't interact with them in a way that doesn't require for me to sell my soul, then I just won't. But I feel bad for the younger generations who have grown alongside this bullshit and believe that it's normal.

It would be incorrect to say that the good times are over, because we've already been living in the bad times for a long while. But it's about to get a whole lot worse as we see the evidence everywhere that companies are done with the growth phase on their products and are transitioning into the profit now phase. That means worse products at higher prices, and any pushback they receive is just going to lead the to complaining about how the young people don't want to work 80 hours a week to be able to give the little money to rich executives, and rather than improve their product they will lobby the government for another handout or a tax break.

Your paperback book comes with a list of all the other books the author has written at the start and, frequently, an excerpt from a book by a different author at the end. Those are ads.

@apewins: Fighting for my life to not be dismissive due to the sheer drama of this goddamn post.

@brian_: I don't think the piracy example is helpful because you can pirate movies and TV shows just as easily and have no ads.

Itch.io is a better example, but while some Blu-rays do have ads that can't be skipped there are still many that don't or just boot you to the main menu where you can select your movie.

Games are certainly less prone to ads than some media, but probably more prone than others. Again if I boot up my Youtube Music app the only "ads" I see are for things like the service's year end recap or playlists it thinks I might like, and I don't consider them ads because none of them are looking for my money. Netflix is pretty much the same.

This is a big reason why I've started using my old iPod (the "classic" click wheel one) again. No internet. No ads. I can listen to my podcasts and music in peace. I used to use Overcast on my phone for podcasts but the free version has extremely obnoxious ads for podcasts that I want nothing to do with inserted on every screen (finance/tech bro podcast ads and stuff like that). If there was a flat fee to use the thing I'd pay it but I don't want yet another subscription. Spotify, which I pay money for, still shoves promoted content onto the front page (See them pushing Joe Rogan on everyone for like 6 months straight). For books and audiobooks luckily our local library uses an iPad app that is ad-free.

But yes, advertising has become obnoxious. The worst part is the permanent damage it has started to do to journalism and access to information. You can't Google anything anymore because every website at the top of results is now tuned to show up there and not actually have info in hopes that you click on the page, scroll through it trying to find the information, and give them ad views.

Most internet-based news has been destroyed by advertising too. You can no longer read a single article and be up to date on a given topic. Now you have to read five articles (because more clicks means more money), all of which have two to three paragraphs of filler junk at the start to force you to scroll down the page and see more ads. By the time you piece together all of the information from the various articles on a given topic you might have a clue what's going on but probably not. Outside of a shrinking few outlets, most internet-based outlets now write their headlines like tabloids and in the scariest, most hyperbolic way possible since people's innate fear and anger responses causes them to click on headlines (or they phrase headlines as vague, leading questions which don't get answered in the article). Headlines have often become divorced entirely from the content of the article. Burying the lede is now the standard since people have to scroll by ads to find it. Paying for an internet news source doesn't fix this problem either because now a lot of news is just structured this way. People made fun of Dan Ryckert when he said he resubscribed to a physical newspaper (he has a good one where he lives) to get the news instead of using the internet but I think he's actually onto something. (edit: to be clear, I'm not blaming the rank-and-file journalists for this. This phenomenon is the result of management seeing the types of behavioural psychology social media companies were abusing and trying to work that into their product to boost revenue. I imagine the average journalist hates this stuff just as much as I do)

Then there's sports. If you haven't watched NFL football in say a decade or so (like I hadn't until recently. Damn you Remap Radio), you will be in for a shock at how atrocious it is now with ads. NFL, and sports in general, has always been rotten with ads but not like this. The US loosened restrictions on gambling advertising so it's all gambling ads all the time. Every ten seconds you are reminded to do a parlay. They do dedicated odds sections of broadcasts now for not just if team X or Y will win, but what will happen in the game. One province here in Canada also loosened gambling and gambling ad restrictions so now everyone in every province is inundated with gambling ads during every sports event too.

The result of all of this is that I now approach the internet completely differently than I did even a year or two ago. I'm off social media, I don't habitually check the news throughout the day, and I basically only visit a few websites I have bookmarked. The only internet-y things left that I do are post here (because I enjoy writing) and watch livestreams from GB and a few select Twitch channels I enjoy (which, this replaces TV for me since I don't watch TV anymore). I approach the internet like it's 2005ish (i.e. it's a tool I use to look up information but not spend a bunch of time on) and it has done wonders for my mental health.

Every single time I try to open a forum post after coming to Giant Bomb on my phone, I'm hit with a full-screen ad that doesn't load properly. There are ads on podcasts and my Kindle. The internet brought us into a new era of advertising, and the mobile internet made it worse.

But advertisements have always* been a thing, and they've always been shit. Look at old newspapers. They're inundated with ads for things like tonics and elixirs and topical creams that make outlandish claims. It's different now, but it's always been bad.

*(At least, within living memory.)

I think the biggest problem is most "platforms" run some sort of advertising and the level at which you can advertie on them is VERY LOW.

There should be an "upscale" advertising level for all websites that all social media and news services use for advertising with a paid membership. However, the paid membership level advertising is ONLY " top shelf alcohol, luxury real-estate, designer fashion, top-brand autos, companies listed on S&P 1500; S&P Global 1200, NYSE, etc." So no clickbait articles needed to pad the bottom line, this platform's clients are only the advertisers who can pay out the nose.

People WOULD pay not to be advertised to by the riff-raff selling cash-for-gold or clickbait articles with 90% advertising on every page.