You know what I miss? Ads aimed at the general audience of a magazine/newspaper/show/whatever. Ads that told you something about the sort of person who regularl

You know what I miss? Ads aimed at the general audience of a magazine/newspaper/show/whatever. Ads that told you something about the sort of person who regularly enjoyed the thing they were in. Ads that were local and carried the unique culture of your town. Ads that were aimed at an audience larger than "exactly you" but at an audience smaller than "the entire country". Now everything on the internet is a generic slurry of Content shoved through a handful of corporate pipes that do their best to strip any ads off and substitute their own. And the bidding structure means you end up getting the same ads again and again, ad nauseum. You never get that one crazy local mattress salesman doing goofy, awkward skits at 3am, you just get another fucking Grammarly ad or whatever. Or you get some horrible micro-targeted thing aimed at whatever precise demographic you've been sliced into by the immense piles of data all the tracking companies have collected, sold by someone drop-shipping junk from China behind a brand identity they spun up two weeks ago when the previous one was getting too many bad reviews. I make comics and put 'em online. When the webcomic ad network Project Wonderful died, I just quit running ads on my comics. Patreon had come along not too long before that and made me much more money than ads ever did. I do kind of miss being able to have some ad spaces that earnt enough money to have ads for my comics regularly popping up on other comics, attracting the attention of people who were interested in reading weird indy comics online. Now the space of "comics on the web" is mostly dominated by a couple of corporate Content Pipes that want everything to fit into the Procrustean bed of one panel at a time on a phone screen and might deign to give you a part of the ads they run against your work if you get enough views. The idea of "stock photos with product placement" sure is not making me excited. Fuck ads, and fuck the modern Internet ad world even more.