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Train | Oct 11 2003

I hesitate to mention this, it’s such a small thing, just a bit of passing landscape seen from the window of the train. It’s about paid advertisements on independent websites and how much I hate them and how several people I respect are putting such ads on their sites and how this saddens me.

I know, paid advertisements on independent websites, who fucking cares.

It’s just that I feel oppressed and sickened by the avalanche of billboard ads and subway ads and magazines ads and newspaper ads and radio ads and television ads and product placements and Internet ads and ads on the bus and subway and in cabs and on clothing (how did they fool us into that one?) and sometimes even ads written across the sky.

I won’t try to convince you that capitalism is death. Either you believe this or you don’t, and in any case the sun will still rise tomorrow and capitalism will remain death.

Instead I want to tell a story.

Four years ago I read Paul Ford’s Ftrain for the first time and fell in love. What amazed me about Ftrain, aside from Paul’s writing, was that it was free. In fact the whole web was free, and not all of it sucked. People as gifted as Paul Ford were publishing online with no other motive than to be read and perhaps convince a few unsuspecting souls to want to sleep with them.

It seemed a sort of paradise. Nothing to buy, nothing to sell. Of course it’s become a muddled sort of paradise over time, as Paul Ford now uses Ftrain to advertise his availability for work. I do the same, and it’s at the point where most of my clients learn about me via Oblivio. Is my “Hire This Man” link an advertisement? Yes, and yet I consider this quite different from the paid Google ads that have been showing up on popular independent websites of late, the sort of ads that bring a dollar or more per click.

I talked about this recently with a friend who edits such a site. He said what I expected him to say, which is that it takes a lot of time to produce a decent website and that no one is paying him to do it.

It’s hard to argue with this. I average about twenty hours a week on Oblivio. I try to make it good. No one is paying me. If someone offered me money to write it, I’d take that money in a heartbeat.

But paid ads, however you cut them and for whatever reason you accept them, are gross. It’s gross to see ads appearing in places where none had existed. It’s gross to be served up “targeted” links to products and services you have no interest in, to put it nicely, and to know that what’s driving this supposed bit of helpfulness is money.

My friend pointed out that no large-scale print publication could survive without advertising revenue, and that, like it or not, this is the direction the web is going. Again he’s right. But being right doesn’t make it right, nor make me like it.

When people say the Internet is maturing, what they really mean is that it’s opening its legs to capitalism, or that capitalism is finally figuring out how to make it into a thing with a hole and legs that spread.

I don’t mean to call my friend a sell-out. Selling-out is at best a matter of degree these days. But this particular loss runs deep for me because of what these sites, and this form, have meant to me.

Like I say, just a bit of passing landscape. Take it for what it’s worth.

The train rolls on.