Ads are bad because of their implementation, not as a concept. The “alternatives” are not paywalls vs. ads, the alternative is to be a less awful ad provider.

Ads are bad because of their implementation, not as a concept. The “alternatives” are not paywalls vs. ads, the alternative is to be a less awful ad provider. Unintrusive text is fine. Static images without flashy animations are fine. Even watching something like a funny TV commercial is great because it seems worth the time. Yet somewhere along the line, somebody decided it was “fine” to shove overlays in my face, stubbornly keep things in place during scrolling, auto-playing sound, etc. And all that crap is before even factoring in the gigabytes of bandwidth stolen from me to download and run JavaScript that ultimately serves to be a creepy stalker around the Internet. So feel free to work on ads without shame as long as the ads you work on aren’t shameless.