[hanginghyena]

Sorry, this is faux outrage. Some real world perspective:

- Content promotion is different than display ads, at least in terms of how receptive the audience is to buying. There's lots of research around this (nobody trusts display ads).

- Most content promo widgets run way below the fold and are a last squeeze on the traffic before it leaves your site. The alternative to not running it is earning nothing, not swapping it out. Generally you've already flashed your own related content widget at the visitor.

- You may hate it but... you clicked on it. We're giving you what you want. If you like looking at stupid cat pictures (or worse), someone will give you stupid cat pictures. We're not paid to provide moral or intellectual censorship...

- Old School Traffic Washing... so what? You take a bunch of junk traffic and filter it into real humans who are in a relaxed and receptive frame of mind. Often with some level of intelligence about what they are interested in, via the stuff they click on. That's actually a good ad audience.

Seriously, do Google display advertisers reduce their rates because the last search on Google was for "my filthy secret"? No, that space runs at the same rate.

What's next, you gonna ban advertising from stupid TV shows too? There's stuff on cable that's easily as bad as many click-bait sites, in terms of intellectual content.

As long as it's not a bot and the brand ad is running next to content appropriate for a brand ad, not seeing what the problem is here. If you don't like it, don't place it on your site or click on it.

[I'd be more outraged about pop-ups and toolbar widgets; that IS a UX interruption and often non-consensual...]

[acbabis]

> You may hate it but... you clicked on it. We're giving you what you want. If you like looking at stupid cat pictures (or worse), someone will give you stupid cat pictures. We're not paid to provide moral or intellectual censorship...

That's true to an extent, but go to your Facebook feed (if you have one), find a clickbait article and (without clicking on it) read the comments below.

Almost invariably, there will be someone complaining that they clicked the link out of curiosity then quickly left after discovering how abysmally horrible the user experience is.

Some of the sites literally (as in literally) make you go to a new page of ads for each sentence you read. Their whole business model is to trick you into loading the ads in your browser and showing you as many as possible before you give up.

So it's a bit of an oversimplification to say people are clicking on these links because they want to. People buy snake oil because they want to.

[nimblegorilla]

> - You may hate it but... you clicked on it. We're giving you what you want. If you like looking at stupid cat pictures (or worse), someone will give you stupid cat pictures. We're not paid to provide moral or intellectual censorship...

Clickbait articles have low quality content. It's usually hard to judge article quality by the link's title. Most people are tired of being misled into trashy websites.

[mtrn]

> You may hate it but... you clicked on it. We're giving you what you want.

You tell me once, I need X, I won't care. You tell me ten times a day I need X, I might get tired. Color me pessimistic, but people in general just need to be told with clear words over and over what to do and without a strong independent or stubborn mind they will follow.

[hanginghyena]

My machine learning algorithm says you will click on. So Dance, Monkey, Dance!!!!!

<I think we've finally found skynet. They live at Outbrain.>

[amelius]

> You may hate it but... you clicked on it. We're giving you what you want. If you like looking at stupid cat pictures (or worse), someone will give you stupid cat pictures.

Yes, my brain has a weak spot for cat pictures, but I don't want to have it challenged all the time.