Yahoo relies on annoying ads and specialized Websites

Will Internet news go the way of newspapers?

December 17 was the anniversary of President Obama's call for change in our Cuba policy. That milestone sparked a lot of coverage in the mainstream press, which I discussed in a post on my blog on the Cuban Internet.

The most extensive Cuba coverage I saw was a week-long series of posts on Yahoo -- U. S. and Cuba, One Year Later. The series has many well written posts on various aspects of Cuban culture and the political situation. Most are human interest stories on tourism, fashion, baseball, etc., but several were Internet-related.

The posts are not detailed or technical, but they are well written for a general audience -- like newspaper readers. (Remember newspapers)?

That is the good news.

The bad news is that the posts are overrun by annoying ads and auto-play videos. This is illustrated by the series "home page," shown below.

The series table of contents -- can you spot the ads?

Most of the elements in this array of phone-sized "cards" consist of an image from and link to a story on Cuba, but, if you look carefully, you will see that several of them link to sneaky ads. It's like Where's Waldo -- can you spot the ads?

In an earlier post, I suggested that advertising-based, algorithm-driven Internet news might be increasingly redundant and concentrated in high-volume sites. The advertising revenue is used to pay talented writers, photographers and videographers who are capable of producing timely news coverage of a story like this one.

But, people are fed up with those ads and increasingly deploying ad blockers.

Reasons people turn to ad blockers

People are circulating manifestos and Google and Facebook are proposing standards to improve the advertising and speed of the Web, but will those moves cut Yahoo's revenue?

Furthermore, mainstream media like Yahoo rely to some extent on specialized, "long tail" sources, like my Cuban Internet blog. Yahoo interviewed me (and many others) and took material from some of my posts in preparing their coverage. But, will specialized blogs and sites continue to exist? Losing focused sources would increase the cost of mainstream media stories.

I really liked Yahoo's coverage of Cuba one year later, but I wonder if they will be around for Cuba five years later.

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Update 12/27/2015

ASUS will include the AdBlock Plus ad blocker in their proprietary browser. Apple is now allowing ad blockers on iOS devices. Will Firefox be next? Microsoft Edge?