The only thing I appreciate more than the retina display on my laptop is the Adblock and Adblock Plus extension on my browser. This might seem pretty weird at first, but in reality its like wearing sunglasses to protect from the UV radiation in the world of unnecessary advertisements.
I know that my blog too shows up some ads, but who cares, I get some money out of it and I have AdBlock plus😉. Sometimes I don't understand, why am I so much against advertisements. I had always been the kind of kid who had very specific demands, and I never enjoyed just watching random stuff on T.V floating around with ads. May be this is the reason I never listen to radio. I prefer listening to my own playlist or watching specific content, at max watching recorded programs on T.V, specifically skipping ads.
I know there must be quite a few of you who love advertisements because of the mere creativity of it. But every time I watch ads, I feel as though I am stepping into a magical zone where by I am about to be fooled by a glamourised magician.
Recently I binge watched Black Mirror, one of my favourite TV series and I couldn't stop rewatching the episode: "Fifteen Million Merits" which kind of highlights the side effects of a world with too much ads. Imagine a place where you need to pay money to skip ads. Yes, I do agree, business can run only when they publicise their product or service, but I think they are so much integrated in our lifestyle and gotten into our heads that every time I listen to the song "Ink by Coldplay", I remember the tune of "For healthy oil, for healthy people" thanks to one of my friend for ruining this song for me btw.
Children in schools are in no habit of reading newspapers, but in order to increase their vocabulary and general knowledge are forced into the habit of reading newspapers. Which is a good habit, I don't oppose to that but I preferred my news on my black mirror, coz spreading arms 3 feet wide just to read classified was never my cup of tea. TOI app was one nice option until I bought an iPhone 5s. It was a great 4 inch phone but the TOI app's ads took up 3 inches of space and everyday I could read very little useless information.
Switching over to a bigger phone didn't help either, It just zoomed in the same futile information along with nonsense ads. But then came an app which shut down each and every News app in India: "Inshorts". So it is a free app which gave collection of news summaries in 60 words along with relevant photographs including links to read the full news, for free. I couldn't understand How? I was just surprised by their business model. I always thought wouldn't the mother of Inshorts owner be asking him..Beta what are you doing with your life, I mean you do great stuff I agree, but when will you earn money? Anyways, this app has become an integral part of my life. I enjoy reading worldly affairs on it.
Is there a point to all this nonsense, or is it even a real problem or is it a too first world problem. I don't know about it, anyways I have a preliminary solution for it. Why not have a platform..Just for ads, I mean just select the category and you would find products and services in the order of amount of money the owner pays. I mean a newspaper only for ads. It wouldnt be called a newspaper then it would become an Ad-Paper. Would people read it? I think some people definitely will. Because of it I guess the size of the newspaper is going to drop to about 4 pages, how exciting is that !!
I just realised I have fallen into my own trap, in order to make my point I advertised for Inshorts, Black Mirror, AdBlock, Apple, Coldplay and maybe TOI. Ohh god this world is a Trap!! I wish I was paid by them for writing this stuff !! 🤔
