Tonight while getting ready for my Podcast I removed a RSS feed from my regular reading list because of excessive advertising in the feed. I’m serious — the stupid ad TechCrunch has after every article in the feed measures 612 pixels in height.
Nothing like being stupid and making me see it after every article. This is abusive and I refuse to read his feed with that crap in it.
Tom’s Hardware is just as bad. Not only do they have a partial content RSS feed, but their partial content is usually just one or two sentences. Every couple of feed items is followed by another feed item containing nothing but an ad, which is usually longer than any of the actual content items.
Turn on Adblock. That will deal with the type of ads that TechCrunch is using. Unfortunately, that won’t help with people like NetworkWorld, who are using even larger, embedded ads on every third post.
Relieved to hear about another exasperated TechCrunch reader. I twitter’d about this recently: http://twitter.com/danmactough/statuses/395475262. The irony is that although TechCrunch piles on more and more advertising, the value of the content is steadily declining toward zero. No longer is it Mike Arrington’s usually insightful observations about new tech companies and web services he finds interesting. Now, TechCrunch just regurgitates the advertising pitch of every Web 2.0 startup that comes along. And don’t get me started about what passes for proper English usage over there anymore….