Why Marketing is Choking the Internet

Click image for original story by N.Y. Times

This screen shot from the N.Y. Times website exemplifies why I believe marketing is literally choking the internet. If you take a look at this partial screen shot, you may notice that there is an advertising banner at the top, a small ad in the bottom right quadrant, and a larger advertisement (partially cut-off) of yet another claiming the bottom right corner. There are buttons for social  media, buttons to "Add to Portfolio" - which portfolio? You gotta click to find out - bet there is an ad or marketing information, or the simple placement of those corporate names may be the sole purpose. It looks like maybe 30% of the screen is actually dedicated to the story itself.

The irony is that the story was about how Facebook is getting even cozier with the advertising and marketing industry so that they can sell even more marketing and make even more money than they already do. There was a time when web designers would be flamed for using too many animated gif images, or too many gaudy advertisements or the the hated "banner ads." So many people got up in arms over pop-up ads that an entire sub-industry popped up just to find ways to block those unwanted advertisements. But the marketing industry find ways around that. They still use spam. They still self-promote endlessly and shamelessly. Government is thinking about "don't track" legislation. Why does that even have to be legislated? It is wrong to track people's buying and browsing habits for no other purpose than to target more advertising at us. What good is having faster and faster internet access, when all it has resulted in is more and more marketing? Now I'm hearing more unwanted audio and video embedded as advertisements, many of which activate without warning if you accidentally mouse-over the ad! More often than not, when a page seems to freeze up momentarily, the little message bar always says something like "waiting for xyz-clickmasterz.com."

Now it seems like every single web page or blog - including my very own (modest I hope) - include some level of advertising or marketing, or the entire site itself is dedicated to marketing and self promotion. Who decided that everybody needs to constantly market themselves and why was that wisdom blindly accepted? Count how many ads you can find on a given web page. How often do you still get pop-up surveys or unwanted "offers to chat with an artificial customer service representative" - even though you have every pop-up ad blocker defense activated?

The latest trend I have noticed, and refuse to participate in, is the pollution of RSS news-feeds with even more marketing. I use a news feed to quickly collect, manage, and read my RSS subscriptions. Nobody has ever asked me if it is okay to embed additional marketing to each preview of the post. So now I am getting hit with marketing from websites I haven't even decided to visit, just so I can preview the headline and decide if it is worth reading or not. I wonder if anyone is tracking RSS subscription rates and can correlate the subscription rate with the amount of marketing success/failure. Is it really worth alienating your readers, just to include even more advertisements that nobody wants to receive?

YouTube is a classic example. It used to be a great place to find useful, funny, and entertaining videos. Now, your screen is filled with advertisements, and often you have to wait for a 7-8 sec video advertisement before you can view what originally interested you. Sure, you can click the "close" icon, but why do I have to do anything? If I have to click a button to skip an advertisement, I am much more likely to just skip the entire video and close the tab. I've unsubscribed to some feeds that had desirable content, but so much marketing and advertising that it just stopped being worth the effort.

Remember when google was a cute little underdog company that provided a novel, but very useful tool - the search engine? But then marketing and SEO appeared and ruined everything. Now, whatever result you are looking for is much harder to find because you have to weed through all the marketing. Try researching examples of Master painters from the 1600's. I guarantee you, the top ten listings are not going to be sites that provide some art history and examples of their art. Instead, 70-90% of the top results will be there because someone put those terms into the C.E.O. The results will be for sites that want to sell you books on Master painters, inexpensive prints and posters, expensive prints by artists who think their style is similar to one of the Masters, DVDs that will teach you to paint like a master. The list goes on. Don't believe me? Try it! I used a wide variety of search terms with modifiers and could not find anything remotely close to what I had hoped to find.

The internet and search engines are great information tools. But when useful information is no longer the focus, what does someone do if they aren't interested in buying anything?