Googling about an event in a Europen micro-nation, I ended up in an archive of the 1957 LIFE magazine. I was shocked at how reminiscent it is of modern news website, with advertisement everywhere that does its best to blend in and pretend it is content.
It’s almost like ads industry is a fucking cancer.
I never mistook the ads for content, but damn there are a lot of them!
Thanks for the interesting link.
I find this ad just incredible. Even as a caricature, it would be considered too much on the nose.
[Off-topic] Given that most sources on the events of Rovereta I’ve seen are in Italian, like this one, you’ll probably have a better chance to find meaningful info by machine translating back and forth between French and Italian, than looking for info straight in English or French.
[On-topic] I believe ad enshittification is as old as advertisement itself. And cyclical:
- New medium appears. It gets popular because it’s user/customer-oriented, and grows at the expense of older media.
- Advertisers surround the new medium, like vultures encircling a chunk of putrid flesh. At the start through black means (like spam), but eventually grey (like exploiting the need of the new medium to survive). Eventually they force their way in.
- Advertisers induce changes on the new medium, so it becomes dependent of advertisement and more advertisement-friendly. At the expense of making it more and more user/customer-hostile.
- The new medium is now as bad as the old media.
- Another new medium appears, and the cycle repeats.
