Click Bait & Ads Rant

I really hate the phrase “click bait”, though not as much as click bait itself. There are a few kinds of this internet equivalent of the ads in the back of a comic book…

One kind is where they offer to show and/or tell you about great free tips like foods that will make you smarter, or some form of gossip about celebs, historical facts you didn’t know about, funny pictures, etc. Then, you go to see this great thing and it’s some sort of slideshow that loads 100 ads every time you click to see the next thing OR it’s just a link full of ads and you have to find the link to the actual page you wanted to see, which most often turns out to be a slide show of one sentence of a large article and at least 100 articles load each time you click to see the next sentence.

Another kind is those advertisements that are everywhere that say you can look younger, feel better, lose weight, have a nicer smile, better skin, better hair, be richer or even be smarter with this “one weird old trick”? Then, the weird old trick turns out to be buying some sort of ridiculous product. I especially despise the ones that say “doctors hate him” or “woman outsmarts plastic surgeons”. I also really dislike the ones where they show a fake news story about a celebrity. Though, as annoying as they are, I can easily ignore them. After all, they are all the same, and they are all bullshit.

To whom do we owe for this bombardment of time & money wasting eyesores? Doctor “Snake Oil” Oz himself! Yup, that man would tell you to drink a gallon of your own piss and put a hardboiled egg up your butt if he thought it would keep his ratings up!

Yes, I do dislike him. Not un-proportionately, I don’t think. Do I? Maybe so, but I get tired of people blindly following made up crap because some smiling idiot on TV told them it would solve every problem for them. The truth is, you have to eat a good diet, exercise, have good hygiene, read, go out in the world and put down you phone – basically take good care of you mind and body, because there is no shortcut to health and wellbeing. No one should be profiting off snake oil in this day and age, even if it is only by boosting their TV ratings and not actually selling the crap themselves.

In addition to click bait, there is just peppering your site/blog with so many ads that it makes for a rather unpleasant experience. This brings me to my fellow bloggers, to whom I wholeheartedly support, except their ridiculous use of advertising to make a few dollars a year.

Some blogger sites are so convoluted that they won’t even load properly. There are ads and surveys popping up over every picture. Videos playing so loud I have to mute my PC because it’s still to loud even with the sound turned to like 2 or 3. There are things blinking and pulsing and popping everywhere. The post I am trying to look at is like three sentences and a dozen pictures and 50 different advertisements!

Seriously, I would rather look at a crappy blog with little to no ads then a nice one with so many ads I can’t even look at what the person has posted. Is it really so important that you make a few cents off your guests that you have to wreak their experience visiting your site? Apparently it is! This is a shame because I have had to stop frequenting a lot of blogs because of them crashing my browser or Java.

All in all, I do think that advertising is a great and effective tool, but I also think if it has to be used to lure people in under false pretences, then it is most likely a load of crap – it is a load of crap – that no one should be falling for.

But hey, this is a rant and I got it off my chest. This is all I needed for now, so I can go back to rolling my eyes at the man who knows one weird old trick that makes doctors furious… and imagining that the man is on the medical board, and the one weird old trick is not falling for a load of bullshit, and the doctor that is furious is doctor Oz!