Has Commercial Advertisement Taken Over and Ruined Everything?

[Wounded Bear]

44. One thing I noticed about the change from print to the 'net...

Newspapers got their major income from ads, too. But they had to pay for paper and ink and distribution, so the actual writing, the news articles, had to be terse and densely written. Editors were famous for cutting all chaff out of articles, even from such things as opinion pieces and LttE. Only major pieces were threaded across multiple pages, because the coin of the realm was column inches.

Now, there are no overhead charges for internet content. Pixels are virtually free. So, writers are seemingly encouraged to ramble and fluff their writing to get more scrolling and 'pages' so they can cram more ads in. Most content is self-edited, and not very well. So writing quality has dropped immensely. Kind of like the entertainment on TV. More of it, packed with more ads, and tons less quality.