• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, August 17, 2018

Between work and my personal interests, I consume a lot of online content. But the process is infuriating.

In a typical instance, I search a topic, and link through. But I can barely scan the headline when the interruptions begin.

There are cookie notices. There are newsletter offers. There are scores of ads, and most of them are irrelevant, like those that pop up in the left-hand corner on the Forbes site, blocking what you want to read — to use a phrase reported by the advertising historian Frank Presbrey, they assail the eye. Worse, a clumsy person like me can accidentally click on ads, thus creating a useless lead — one that will feed right into advertising on Facebook.   

There are surveys, inquiries (“tell us about yourself”), and demands for passwords from sites you haven’t visited since 2011.

There are paywall demands. It’s one thing to ask for money if the person has visited the site several times, but first time out? Don’t their algorithms tell them when someone is only an occasional user, and should be handled differently?

It leads me to conclude that search is no longer a good vehicle for content consumption. Email newsletters are better, from both the user and publisher side.

For one thing, the sender can track clicks and reading behaviors, and use that data to provide more relevant content.

Of course, the subscribers have to find you first — that’s where search plays a role. But make it easy on them.

Don’t think this is a new complaint. As far back as the 1890s, a businessman griped about direct mail, saying it was like being stopped by people on the street. 

He argued that he was “the target of scores of paper bullets which are shot at me every morning. Here, for instance, is a good woman who has imported a lot of baby clothes, and stops me to tell me of it...Another person brings a school to my attention; a second his meats and groceries; a third his unparalleled landaus or other carriages; a fourth his hotel in Florida; another his pickles and other things in which I have no more interest than I have in the man in the moon, yet every day I am compelled to listen for several minutes to their ranting, when I want to be off about my own business.”

Ditto.