Ads, they’re everywhere. Every year they seem to be creeping into every app and service I have online. Whether it be in a mobile game, streaming services, or other entertainment apps like YouTube, ads have become even more of an annoyance than if I were to stand in Times Square in New York City.
Nowadays, it seems like the only way to avoid them is to start a subscription with the app/service. Even if you do start a subscription, apps and streaming services now have tiers of subscriptions.
You can pay simply for the service with all the ads they want, pay more for a more limited number of ads, or pay the maximum and get the service without ads at all. Sure, it can be a good option for people who are on a budget and couldn’t afford it when it was one payment option, but it also seems like a cash-grab.
Especially when looking at services like Amazon Prime. Before, Prime members used to get Amazon Music and Prime Video for free with their membership, but just last year, Amazon decided that Prime members weren’t paying enough already and added a new tier in Amazon Prime for Prime members.
So instead of no ads, they added ads at the beginning and end of each episode streamed. In the beginning, it was only slightly annoying, but soon after the change, they changed it again so that there were ads in every quarter of an episode. Apparently, they decided the first change wasn’t annoying enough to get people to pay the four extra dollars they so desperately wanted.
Recently, I’ve found another problem with ads concerning mobile games. Especially ones targeted towards children. Like any nostalgic college student, I started playing one of my favorite childhood games again called My Singing Monsters. Some of you may know it, but all you really need to know is that it plays ads in between going from island to island and if you want to watch ads to shorten the time on creating new monsters.
Now, just recently the developers of the game sent out a notice that one of their ad partners was showing an inappropriate ad to game accounts labeled as children. The developers put a temporary stop to ads on children accounts as soon as they found out and have started an investigation into their ad partners, but how desperate can you be to show inappropriate ads to children on a children’s game?
Another thing that’s even more annoying is the ads that have two or more screens you have to ex out of. First, you get an ad that is already exhaustingly long by being over thirty seconds long and then getting another thirty seconds of the ad waiting for you to demo it forcefully, and just when you thought you could go back to whatever game or app you were using, it shows you another screen that you need to exit out of again. What’s worse is when that singular ad plays every time the app decides it’s time to play an ad.
It wasn’t always like this. I still remember when ads were just small annoyances that you could ignore, but they’ve gotten more and more persistent and find more and more ways to make viewers look at their advertising for as long as possible. It’s frustrating how they keep encroaching in on every little thing in our lives, and don’t even get me started on the selling of data for “personalized ads.” Ads will always be there, but they shouldn’t be so free to be so frustratingly long or be able to show inappropriate images in children’s games.
