Here's a problem we were experiencing even before the websites in question were obliterated by GenAI content, but it hasn't gotten any better.
Take, for example, a cooking site that is fairly popular (that is, it often shows up in search results for Chinese recipes). The first screenshot here is the site detecting Firefox iOS's adblocker, though you might see it with certain Safari extensions as well.
And why do we run these adblockers? (Click/tap the images to see the whole screenshot)
Because this is what it looks like without. A tequila video ad, covering a newsletter promo overlay, covering another video ad, covering more in-content ads, which are interspersed throughout the actual content — which is loaded with paragraphs of trash unrelated to the actual recipe so that your engagement is goosed for all those ad view numbers.
Do I blame the site owners? Not really; as someone with a money-sucking hobby myself, I know you'd better love writing for a website if it's going to be popular because the server costs alone are gonna be terrible. And if you aren't interested in being a whole-ass MLM with some physical or digital product to sell, the only way to recoup is with ads. We all know nobody wants them or even looks at them, but if we can pretend to the ad brokers (who also know it) that someone did, they'll pass. you a couple of pennies to keep your site running. I don't know how to fix it.
Frankly, I was part of the group that helped build this system, but the rot at the core of the ad business was not something we expected. And I'm not sure anything can undo it, other than possibly the breaking up of the ad-broker monopoly.
