I agree that the social media buttons are a pain, and I certainly advocate against adding them when designing a site, as well as refusing to use them when you'r

I agree that the social media buttons are a pain, and I certainly advocate against adding them when designing a site, as well as refusing to use them when you're a consumer of the site. But unfortunately, while I agree that some of the advertising is annoying, I don't necessarily agree with the premise that there's a better option for these sites right now, or that I see examples of better options under development. Look at the two basic types of adds that you're upset with: First is the interstitial ad - something you have to view (or at least start to view until you cancel it) - before you can read what you want to read. I generally see these ads on newspaper or magazine sites - or at least a business that used to rely on dead trees to get their content out to people. These ads are more or less equivalent to the full page ads you used to see. Often they aren't really relevant to the content because they don't want to suggest that the contents of the article have been influenced by advertisers. The second form, where there are more advertisements than content on a page, is quite horrible, and let's be honest, part of the goal of this is to just get some sort of advertisement out there that users will click on. Those ads will possibly me more relevant to you (or at least be somewhat based on the content of the page). But unless you're seeing ads based on the most expensive keywords, the site isn't earning much money. There was a decent article published a while back about what keywords were worth the most money: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2011/07/18/most-expensive-google-adwords-keywords http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2011/07/18/most-expensive-... So in the end, I understand your annoyance, but it's also sort of hard for me to dislike companies for trying to make sure they can pay the authors of the site's content.