Has WordPress turned blogs into clickbait sites?

Posted on by Matthew Wright

I’ve had little time to blog of late, though I have had every intention of returning to a regular schedule when time is available, at this stage mid-2023. In the interim, though, I’ve discovered something disturbing about the WordPress.com blogging platform.

I’ve been running a ‘free’ blog via WordPress.com since 2010, largely because I put the money I have available for social media into my website. When I first joined WordPress, back in 2010, the price of a free site was – I understood – judicious advertising here and there. Fair enough.

Suddenly – in the past couple of weeks – my blog has become spattered with large and intrusive adverts in huge quantity. They’re inserted at the top. They intrude as pop-up panels that obscure the ‘agree to cookies’ messaging. They’re inserted between paragraphs. They’re inserted between the widgets. They’re inserted between post listings in the home page.

The frequency and intrusiveness of the adverts wrecks the layout and integrity of my blog. It now looks like a clickbait site. And it’ll prompt readers to abandon the effort – they’ll get a couple of paragraphs in, while their screen fills up with ads that have to be cancelled or scrolled past. There’s also the difficulty of disentangling some adverts from my content, especially when an advert in the same format and title font as my blog posts appears in the home page listing.

I intend doing some research. It’s possible a paid subscription will eliminate the spamming. Or maybe not – and I’m not going to part with a cent until I’m sure. If I do have to fork out – well, why bother with WordPress.com anyway? Previously there were SEO advantages and community integration that made it worthwhile, but if WordPress.com now intend saturating their blogging service with design-breaking commercials, I can run this blog just as well from my website, and I’m already paying for that.

Thoughts?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2023

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20 thoughts on “Has WordPress turned blogs into clickbait sites?”

  1. When I started seeing ads for fungal toenail cures and semi-pornographic looking ads for I never figured out what, I was happy to pay $60 (Canadian) for the “personal” plan. It’s worth it only for the ad-free state, but you also get more space for photos.
    I suspect WP inserts especially offensive ads to motivate signups for its paid plans, but I’d rather not have a blog that’s riddled with sketchy-looking stuff, so I’ve knuckled under.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Yes, I might have to as well. Just now I’ve been taking a bit of a break from blogging, largely because I have so much else on my plate writing-wise. I expect to have more time later this year and I’ll look then at what I need to do. It’s irritating – the way WordPress have it set up the first thing anybody sees when arriving at a blog or loading a post is a huge banner advert that could well be offensive. This is all new – I mean, yes, the free blog service used to run adverts, and that’s fair enough. But it’s gone mad of late: readers don’t get blogs, they get a page of adverts from which, perhaps, they can disentangle some blog content. It’s annoying.

      Liked by 2 people

  2. I’m not getting the spamming ads when I click on your blog, but mine is a paid sub (lowest level) because I use my own domain name. I think it’s seeing the ads that’s the disadvantage of no sub, rather than having them added to your blog specifically. Or maybe it’s both.
    How’s your experience with reading others’ blog posts?

    Liked by 2 people

    1. If I log on to WordPress.com, I get a certain number of ads. If I don’t log on and simply jump into a blog (including my own) all I see is adverts, interleaved with a few bits of blog content. It’s totally broken my blog design. I believe that if somebody has a paid account and logs on, they don’t see adverts either on their own site or other people’s.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. I do get pop-ups, usually leaping out to get in the way when I’ve started reading… but I think those are paid for on a higher account and supercede our modest presences.

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  3. Mine as well, Matthew. I even sent a complaint to the ad people telling them that my site was a non-fiction, WWII historical blog with veteran’s obituaries and their ad was plastered across the middle of them. I can see WP getting money for my free blog, but it is recently quite disgraceful.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. It’s definitely not a good look. I’ve been doing some research and discover somebody was blogging on WW1 history with obituaries of veterans – only to have it spammed with advertisements for online wargames. Insensitive at best. Ouch.

      Liked by 1 person

    1. My phone has too. It’s kinda crazy – I’ve seen figures making clear that web-ads don’t actually sell anything much and are merely an irritation, yet there are more and more of them. I intentionally don’t even register what they are advertising. The annoying part is that WordPress gets my content free, it’s my content that draws the readership, but they reap all the income from their large, spammy and intrusive ads. To fix it, I have to pay. It’s all one way, and my only question is the number of ‘e’s I should use in my ‘evil corporate’ designation system. You know, the more ‘e’s prefixing ‘evil’, the more evil the corporate is…

      Liked by 1 person

  5. I’ll be interested to hear what you discover. It’s greed, of course. Too, their efforts at trying to pressure me to take on a paid site have grown the last couple of years. That’s always followed by how I could then take this class and that one so I know how to manage my own site. Really? They want me to pay for the site, then have to learn how to use it? If I’m paying, shouldn’t it all be automated? My tech expertise is virtually nil. I want to spend as much time as possible crafting content, not learning how to manage the site with tools they’re too cheap to automate. I had my own site for six years. It cost me tons of time and money and attracted virtually no notice so I returned to my free site. I don’t possess tech skills. I don’t know anyone who possesses tech skills. I’m not willing to pay someone to fix what I had no idea how to fix while drowning in how-to tutorials that made no sense to me.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. I’ve done a bit of digging. Lots of bloggers have had the same issue, all of it recently. Yet the ‘Happiness Engineers’ from WordPress insist these ads are all normal and nothing has happened. I also found a discussion thread in which the ‘Happiness Engineer’ stated that to stop the problem all one has to do is start a paid blog. I’d be sorry to suppose that WordPress.com has gone to the dark side (as it were), but I get the disturbing impression that they are deliberately organising matters to force users on to a paid plan. The worry is that they have a huge amount of leverage when doing so. For instance, I’ve got a website and could blog from there – but as you point out from your own experience, a self-hosted site is essentially isolated. Whereas if you are hosted on the central WordPress site, you’ve got the networks and connections built in. Users won’t want to throw away their subscribers, either (I certainly don’t). And so WordPress gets its paid subscriptions. I don’t know if this scenario is actually the case, but it certainly looks like it from my perspective. Sigh…

      Liked by 2 people

      1. I’ve seen this coming for a long while as the ads they’ve sent to me encouraging me to upgrade have increased. Thing is, this is an internet trend. Every free service I utilize has started raising the pressure to upgrade over the last several years. We’re seeing the end of free internet as we know it and I’m not surprised. Mostly, it’s corporate greed, but bad actors online haven’t helped (Twitter is an example of what happens when it all goes wrong). Given my decade-long association with WP I’m not closed to the idea of upgrading, but I am cautious given the tendency of Happiness Engineers to disappear as soon as you become a paying customer. It’s like American style health insurance. The instant you sign-up you become an expense.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. It’s reached the point with WordPress where I’m going to have to do something if I continue blogging – I’ve put my blog on hold since January because of workload – I am currently writing full-time on a major project with deadlines. In terms of social media generally it’s disturbing where it has gone – and continues to go: as you say, Word Press is no exception. Twitter is a mess. Nor can I see much changing: what started as idealistic start-ups in the 1990s/early 2000s, with mottos such as ‘don’t be evil’ have become full-scale corporates in which ‘evil’ is a virtue. The drift has been insidious and, alas, the social ecosystems built up by their user-bases and social media gives very considerable power to these corporates, certainly in terms of leverage over their users. I don’t know where it will go, but I have serious concerns for the future in general.

          Incidentally, we have the same health insurance style here in NZ – the difference being that since 1938 the state has also provided free health-care as a human right. Insurance companies have nonetheless gained a foothold since the 1980s, due to the state system being deliberately under-funded from that time, and left badly under-capacity with long wait-times.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. I knew the idealism would die a slow strangulation when corporations caught up to the internet’s potential for exploitation. It sounds like your healthcare system is going the same way as England’s. People need to understand that with private insurance, the instant you sign up you become an expense to be minimized.

            Though my Twitter account remains, I’ve been on Mastodon since last November and find it the kind of experience I’d always hoped Twitter would be. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a positive and possibly something you should investigate when you have time, and if you haven’t already. There are no ads. Your feed is populated with that which interests you and who you follow and that’s all. Bad actors are isolated or removed. It’s easy to find people in a niche, whether it’s writers, scientists, or other professionals. Good luck with your deadlines!

            Liked by 1 person

  6. I complained bitterly and posted about it too, some time ago. I don’t know what happened as I’m still on a free blog, but I don’t see ads on others’ sites as a general rule. Squeaky door syndrome? I also have an ‘outside’ link to my blog so I can check it from time to time.
    Unfortunately, there is no better alternative to WP, at least not yet, and yes, it’s the other bloggers that keep us all here. I used to have my own website, but I could count on the fingers of one hand how much traffic it got, and that was almost 20 years ago when any website was a big deal.
    I wouldn’t go to paid, but I /would/ complain. In writing. With pics of the obnoxious ads.
    Use of the word ‘blackmail’ is also highly recommended, because that is precisely what WP is doing in order to drive users to the paid options. 😦

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Yes, that’s certainly how the behaviour they’re showing presents. I see they’ve been pushing special ‘discount’ offers for the first year’s sub in the past few weeks, unusually so. Standard corporate pressure tactics – I get much the same elsewhere. My power provider, for instance, wants me to join their ‘rewards’ programme in exchange for a day’s ‘free’ power. Call me cynical, but all I can see is that they’re getting around spam laws by – er – ‘inducing’ customers to ‘opt in’ to their mailing lists. These, of course, become a commodity of their own that can be onsold. Ouch. But back to WordPress – I’ve got full-time writing commitments that have kept me off blogging for the last few months, and will for another few yet. However, there’ll be a point where I have the time to return, and I’ll look then into what I’m going to do. I may have to bite the bullet and pay – as you say, WP has no real competition – but it’s irritating. After all, WP get the benefit of free content that attracts traffic to which they then show the ads. I think it ultimately underscores the fact that these days the individual is, by reasonable practical measure, powerless.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. -sigh- not only are we powerless, we have, to all intents and purposes, become The Product. By default. In exchange for a free place to gather and join like-minded people.
        We still want the community, but we’re starting to realise that it’s anything but free.
        I truly believe there has to be a global charter of human rights which states that our data belongs to /us/ and cannot be bartered away ‘for free’ junk. 😦

        Liked by 1 person

  8. I use AdBlock so don’t see any of the ads you’re talking about, but they will do that if you’re not paying for the subscription. It’s like on YouTube and everything else – don’t pay the subscription? You will face ads! Double stacked! No skip!!!

    If you pay for the most basic annual subscription they’ll go away.

    Also, run a malware check on your laptop/uninstall any browser extensions you no longer use. Update your browser etc. (just in case it’s malware)

    This expert advice will be $35. Thanks.

    Liked by 2 people

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