I know it can't be just me, but their sites really are just becoming unusable now whenever you click on an article. It's actually really shit how when you search for something on a search engine depending on the news source you click on almost any site and it's some god awful subscription pop up or even try to spam email pop ups to make you register to their website. A lot of these big tech and mainstream sites seem to be going this way.
The guardian's pretty hilarious with their e-begging messages which is interesting because I wonder if their traffic is starting to drop as people get sick of their neverending nonsense. If we got to see a ton of journalists getting laid off that would be hilarious.
Just a rant, because again as somebody who does actual research I find it extremely annoying having to sift through these shitty news sources because they keep getting bumped up in the algorithm even though you can't even read their articles half the time anymore. The worse offenders seem to be sites like the Telegraph and the Economist yet they clearly get search engine favouritism. It's also why I whine when people post up twitter links and expect me to sign up to that crap just to look at one post, no thanks.
Wikipedia has CONSTANT e-begging and I only use it for plot summaries of western media to know if it turns shit or not.
I think it's an indication of how much of a minority they are that they can't maintain an audience to survive on advertising alone so need to milk the few that still view them. I think YouTubers have a bigger viewership than these news sites nowadays.
I started adding those begging messages to my adblocker
It takes a lot of fiddling with filters to keep them away. The fuckers constantly manage to get around blocks with a different banner.
At least they figured out Jimbo's freakin face was driving away donations, lol