memes

I’m also old (well, middle-aged is the right word I guess), but having lived through the adpocalypse that was the early 2000s, when the majority of sites were rushing to demonstrate their lofty stock valuations and satisfy their debtors by bringing in as much revenue as possible no matter the cost to the user base, I never really had that much patience for this business model, especially not once they discovered the concept of pop-ups (or worse, pop-unders).

I’ve also personally worked for a site whose business model was entirely based on SEO and click funneling and that has further eroded my patience to pretty zero. Pretty much none of our developer meetings were ever about “how can we make the product more useful to our users so they’ll actually WANT to come back”, it was always “our numbers are declining, how can we jam in more ads in order to meet the quarterly revenue goals?”

Yes, there are some sites that DO work hard to make actual, original content in order to earn those clicks, but for the most part, it’s an amoral, downright parasitical industry that doesn’t deserve any sympathy or goodwill.