Blocking ads just to read a page? Blame ads, trackers and AI slop

You now spend more time blocking ads than reading the page you came for. You click a link, and before you get a single sentence in you’ve declined a cookie banner, closed a newsletter pop-up and muted a video that started playing on its own. Then the paragraph you were reading jumps down the screen because an animated ad finally loaded above it. And all too often the article underneath turns out to be AI slop, filler text written to hold ad slots rather than to tell you anything.

Advertising pays for much of the open web. Fine. But the way it’s served today hits readers three ways at once. Pages are bloated, they’re visually exhausting, and they move or refresh while you’re trying to read. Paywalls and subscriptions offer a way out, as long as publishers stick to one rule. Once you pay, you shouldn’t see ads. Not fewer ads. None.

What is wrong with ads on websites today?

Ads aren’t the problem. Newspapers, radio and television have run on advertising for more than a century without making anyone install software just to read the sports page. The problem is how ads are served on the modern web.

The scripts and trackers behind the ads routinely outweigh the article they sit beside. Animated banners and autoplay video compete with the text for your attention, and win. Late loading ads shove the page around, and ad refresh keeps swapping in new ones while you read. Every ad slot can bring along a crowd of third-party trackers that follow you from site to site. To top it all off, the money increasingly rewards cheap, AI-generated pages written for search engines rather than people.

Think of it as a recipe where the garnish weighs more than the meal.

How ads and trackers inflate page weight

Page weight is the total size of everything your browser has to download to show a page, including HTML, images, fonts and scripts. An article is mostly text, and text is tiny. A few thousand words of plain text take up less room than a single small photo.

So where does all the weight come from? Mostly from the advertising machinery around the content. Header bidding scripts run a live auction for every ad slot while the page loads (yes, an auction, every time, for you). Tracking pixels and analytics tags arrive from several companies at once. The cookie banner is itself a consent management platform with its own scripts. Video ad players load whether or not anyone presses play, and retargeting scripts quietly build a profile of what you read.

You pay for every layer. Pages load and respond more slowly, especially on a phone or a patchy connection. On a metered data plan you’re paying to download ads you never asked for. Ad scripts keep chewing through battery and processor time long after the page appears (if your laptop fan spins up on a news site, that’s why). And each extra third-party script is one more company taking notes on your reading habits.

You can see the gap for yourself in about a minute. Open a big news site with your browser’s developer tools showing the Network tab, then reload the same page with an ad blocker on. Watch the request count and megabytes drop. That difference is the garnish.

Why animated ads are so distracting

Reading takes sustained attention, and animated ads are built to break it. Your eye is wired to notice movement at the edge of your vision, and ad formats exploit that instinct shamelessly. Banners loop, flash and slide. Autoplay videos start on their own (sometimes with sound) and then follow you down the page in a little corner box. Sticky ads cling to the top or bottom of the screen. Interstitials cover the whole page until you find a close button roughly the size of a sesame seed. And below every article sits a grid of clickbait thumbnails promising one weird trick.

Even the ad industry admits this goes too far. The Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group, publishes the Better Ads Standards, which list autoplay video with sound, flashing animated ads, pop-ups and large sticky ads among the formats people find most disruptive. Google Chrome has used those standards to filter ads on sites that repeatedly break them. The same formats are still everywhere.

The result is a page where a few hundred words of useful text sit inside a slot machine, and you end up reading the same sentence three times. Exhausting.

How ad refresh and layout shift disrupt reading

Two habits do the most damage to the reading experience. Ad refresh changes what’s on the page without warning, and layout shift moves the page itself.

Ad refresh and auto reloading pages

Ad refresh is the practice of swapping out the ads on a page at set intervals, often every 30 seconds or more, without you doing anything. It lets a site sell more ad impressions from a single visit. Some sites go further and reload the entire page on a timer, which bounces you back to the top and wipes out anything you’d typed into a form.

Ad refresh pads the impression numbers. It doesn’t make anyone more interested in the ad. An ad that changes beside the paragraph you’re reading is a distraction, not a sales pitch.

Layout shift and Cumulative Layout Shift

Layout shift happens when something loads late and pushes the visible page down or sideways. Ads are a leading cause, because ad slots are often filled after the article text has already appeared. You know the result. You reach for a link, the page lurches, and you tap an ad instead.

Google measures this with Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), one of its Core Web Vitals, and uses it as a page experience signal. So by Google’s own measure, a jumpy page is a worse page. The fix is almost embarrassingly simple, because reserving fixed space for each ad slot before it loads prevents most layout shift. Many publishers still don’t bother.

How much time you spend blocking ads just to read

Before you can read a typical ad-supported article, you often have to clear an obstacle course.

1. Decline or customise a cookie consent banner, sometimes across several screens.
2. Close a newsletter or subscription pop-up.
3. Close or mute an autoplay video that follows the page as you scroll.
4. Dismiss a browser notification prompt.
5. Wait for late loading ads to stop shifting the layout.
6. Scroll around sticky banners that hide part of the screen.

And that’s just one page. Staying ahead of it takes ongoing effort. You install a content blocker such as uBlock Origin, choose filter lists and write custom rules to hide whatever still sneaks through. You allow ads on the sites you want to support, then find that half of them break without their ad scripts while the other half throw up a wall demanding you switch the blocker off. Eventually you lean on your browser’s reader mode just to see the words in peace.

Over a week of ordinary browsing, all that tidying adds up to real time spent cleaning a page before you can use it. Blocking ads isn’t about getting something for free. It’s about getting to read at all.

How AI slop is funded by ad revenue

AI slop is low quality content mass produced with generative AI and published to rank in search results and fill ad inventory, not to help anyone. You’ve met it. It’s the “best of” list where every product is “a great choice for most users,” the recipe with three thousand words of filler before the ingredients, and the article that restates its headline five different ways without ever answering it. It’s often confidently wrong, with no named author and no sources.

Slop and ad-funded publishing feed each other. When revenue depends on page views, the cheapest page view is the most profitable one. Generative AI pushes the cost of making a page close to zero, so the incentive is to publish thousands of them, load every one with ads and trackers, and let search traffic do the rest.

Land on one of these pages and you get the worst of both worlds. It’s all the weight and distraction of the ad stack, wrapped around something nobody should have bothered to write. It’s dense-pack sludge with a side of surveillance.

Why publishers depend on advertising

To be fair to publishers, good journalism, reviews and analysis cost real money. Writers, editors, photographers and developers need paying, and hosting isn’t free. Advertising lets people read without paying directly, and for many sites it’s still the main source of income.

The catch is economic. Display ads pay very little per impression, so publishers make up the shortfall with volume, which means more slots, more refreshes, more trackers and more pages. That sets off a downward spiral. The reading experience gets worse, more people install ad blockers, ad revenue falls, and publishers respond by adding still more ads. Advertisers lose too, because their brands end up sitting next to slop.

It doesn’t have to work this way. Publishers can run fewer ads and keep them still, and they can reserve space so the page never jumps. They can target ads by the topic of the article instead of tracking readers across the web. They can drop autoplay, sound and full page interstitials, stop refreshing ads while someone is actually reading, and serve ads from their own domain instead of through dozens of third-party scripts. None of that is rocket science. It’s basic good manners.

What are the alternatives to ads?

Advertising isn’t the only way to pay for content. A hard paywall puts everything behind a subscription, which is simple but shuts out casual readers. A metered paywall gives you a few free articles each month before asking you to subscribe. A freemium model keeps most content free and charges for the in-depth work. Memberships and donations let readers chip in voluntarily to keep content open for everyone. Micropayments, which charge a small amount per article, have been “about to take off” for roughly as long as the web has existed. Sponsorships fund an article, newsletter or podcast through one clearly labelled sponsor with no tracking attached. And in Europe, “pay or consent” models ask you to either accept personalised ads or pay for an ad-free version.

Every one of these works best when the deal is clear. You know what you pay, and you know what you get.

Why paying subscribers should never see ads

Charging readers and still showing them ads is the most corrosive habit in digital publishing. News subscriptions that keep the display ads, the sponsored “partner content” and the trackers break the basic logic of a subscription. So do paid streaming plans that come with commercials. You paid to make the ads go away. That was the whole point.

A paid subscription should mean no banners, no pop-ups and no autoplay video. It should mean no third-party ad tracking, because your reading habits aren’t a second revenue stream. It should mean a calm, stable page with no ad refresh and no layout shift, and no prompts nagging you to subscribe to the thing you already pay for. Any sponsored content that’s left should be clearly labelled. In short, none of the tracking bu!!shit.

If a subscription doesn’t cover the costs, the honest fix is a higher, clearly stated price. Charging subscribers and then selling their attention anyway means getting paid twice for the same page view. It also quietly removes the best reason anyone had to subscribe.

What a reader-first web looks like

A better recipe for online publishing isn’t complicated. Free content can carry ads, as long as they’re light, still, relevant to the page and respectful of your time. Paid content comes with no ads and no tracking. And both are written by people for people, with named authors, cited sources and an actual reason to exist.

Publishers who serve it that way earn trust, attention and revenue that lasts. Until more of them do, ad blockers will stay among the most popular browser extensions around, and you’ll keep clearing the table before you can eat. No garnish required.

Frequently asked questions

Why are websites so slow with ads?

Ads load many third-party scripts for ad auctions, tracking, analytics and video players. Each script adds network requests, data to download and work for the browser, which slows page loading and scrolling, especially on mobile devices.

What is ad refresh?

Ad refresh is the practice of replacing the ads on a page at set intervals, often every 30 seconds or more, without the reader doing anything. It increases the ad impressions a site can sell per visit, but it adds distraction and can cause the layout to shift.

What is AI slop?

AI slop is low quality content mass produced with generative AI, usually to rank in search engines and earn ad revenue. It’s typically vague, repetitive or inaccurate, and often has no named author or sources.

Why do people use ad blockers?

People use ad blockers to make pages load faster, reduce tracking, cut visual distraction and avoid malicious ads. If you want to support a site, you can allow its ads when they’re respectful, or pay for a subscription or membership.

Should paid subscribers see ads?

No. A paid subscription should remove display advertising and third-party ad tracking. If a subscription doesn’t cover costs, a higher, clearly stated price is more sustainable than charging readers and still selling their attention.