i was browsing the feed™ on my phone and there was an interesting article from USA Today about Florida's book bans and bookstores. i was on my phone at the time, a Google® Pixel 7© Pro™, for which i still do not have an adblock solution. the vanilla experience.
the page is full of ads, of course, including a video ad that auto-plays, i pause, and then automatically restarts when i start scrolling the page.
the thing is, though, i use Google® Fi™. i have """"""unlimited data""""""; it just costs $10 per gigabyte.
this page — this single story page — ate 16.4 MB. one page. one article.
it cost me a non-trivial amount just to view this page. if i was to, say, read 5 articles a day — you know, maybe two pages of a physical newspaper — i would be paying nearly $25, more than the total cost of my plan before data.
and it's not just one webpage, it's every webpage. everything is like this. everything is this shitty. and to interact with the world at all is to have to immerse yourself in it. it fucking sucks!
oh, and because of course it is, this was also one of those funny webpages that hijacks your back button. "please don't go yet, read these other clickbait articles!" eat my entire fucking ass.
The newspaper is earning far less from those ads than the $0.16 that they're costing you. Usually they're getting around one-tenth of that amount. The people who are selling you out are doing it for the crumbs from this shit sandwich.
