There's something so wonderfully easy about reading this column in a physical newspaper. You turned the page, and here it is, with few annoyances or distractions, in an ultra-high-definition (超高清的) typeface which was custom-designed with pleasurable reading in mind. Or-wait-are you reading this on a phone? Did you follow a link from Twitter or Facebook? Or maybe you're on a train, or a plane, or you're trying to use your laptop on your cousin's crappy Wi-Fi connection out in the countryside somewhere. In which case, there's a pretty good chance that even getting this far is some kind of minor miracle.
When talking about the economics of online publishing, the first thing to remember is that job No. 1 isn't to get the news to you. Rather, it is to monetise you, by selling you off, in real time, to the highest bidder. This happens every time you click on a link, before the page has even started to load on your phone. Once upon a time, if you and I both visited the same web page at the same time using the same web browser, we would end up seeing the same thing. Today, however, an almost unthinkably enormous ecosystem of scripts and cookies and auctions and often astonishingly personal information is used to show you a set of brand messages and sales pitches which are tailored almost uniquely to you.
That ecosystem raises important questions about privacy and just general creepiness－the way that the minute you look at a pair of shoes online, for instance, they then start following you around every other website you visit for weeks. But whether or not you value your privacy, you are damaged, daily, by the sheer weight of all that technology.
Online ads have never got less annoying over time, and you can be sure that mobile ads are going to get more annoying as well, once Silicon Valley has worked out how to better identify who you are. The move to greater privacy protections might help slow the pace with which such technologies are adopted. But there's no realistic hope that websites will actually improve from here. If you want to avoid the dreadful experience of the mobile web, you'll only have one choice－which is to start reading your articles natively, in the Facebook or Apple News app. But it won't be Facebook and Apple who killed the news brands. It'll be ad tech.
