work in progress

Employing tricks like needless pagination, auto-refreshing (see Salon.com), misleading headlines, and the like is cheating. You didn’t earn those pageviews, you tricked people into giving them to you. And then you look at shit like popups, popunders, double underlined links, Snap previews, Tynt scripts, and so on, and it’s pretty clear how hostile it all is. It’s nothing but money-grabbing. If you’ve got it set up so bad that your readers are employing things like ad blockers and Safari’s Reader, you fucked up. You did something wrong. You overestimated how much your readers are willing to tolerate.

161 notes