The worst thing about the internet is that it's free.

Our current internet experience is awful and getting worse, in the age of the free internet we pay for it with our attention, and this serves nobody.

The internet has grown to be so abundant and profound that along with fire and the wheel, it's one of the most transformative inventions and concepts the world has ever seen.

It's fast, free and pretty much omnipresent, and it's getting better and better.

You can now use the internet to access anything ever made in the history of mankind.

You now no longer need to know anything.... languages, facts, where you are going, it's clear that it's become of such great value that you can't even begin to contemplate life without it.

Think of how the internet has changed education, what role is knowledge in a world where knowledge is everywhere? If our schools are here to prepare 6 year olds to live abundant prosperous lives, how can we educate them for the year 2028, when they may be emerging into the world of work. Think what the internet will mean for these people.

Some think the internet is becoming more important than real life, Marc Andreseen this week tweeted '" At any moment in time, what's on screen in your hand is likely more interesting & important than what's around you" and "that the screen in your hand contains the entire world vs immediate locality". It's hard to stomach, but undeniably true than when our phones are portals to everything in the world ever made. The biggest challenge for our significant other is proving to be more interesting than our smartphones.

The internet is so incredible that we accept it for what it is. We don't ask the tricky questions, it seems rude to question something so perfect, but there are killer flaws and most stem from one thing.

The problem with the internet is that it's free.

People need to make money from the internet.

Our entire internet experience is designed around the extraction of money in the most efficient ways, not our viewing pleasure.

My daily experience on the internet is one of welcome screens that frustrate me, accidental clicks on things I don't want, pop ups, interstitials, pre-rolls, poor design, dark design, spam.

If we take a step back, forget our latent fondness for the internet and view it with fresh eyes. The internet is a disgrace to design and all for what? Advertising.

Digital advertising has for all intents never worked. The killer problems with digital advertising are that there is limitless inventory and people don't notice online ads, this keeps the cost of online ads low.

But bills need to be paid, we have a massive infrastructure of very expensive sites to maintain. Newspapers, Magazines, Social Networks, 95% of apps ever made, the continued assumption is that advertising is answer to all " how will it make money questions". Whether you're Facebook, SnapChat, Pinterest, Yo, Secret, whatever the app du jour is, the assumption is unfalteringly that there is money to be made from ads. If it cost money to build and it not selling something, then what's being sold is us. We sell our attention.

It wasn't like this before, while Newspapers were designed to inform, entertain they were also paid for. Ads in Newspapers were designed to tread the delicate balance between providing additional revenue, while not annoying the reader too much, there was a symbiotic relationship to maintain. The same true for most TV, cinema advertising, magazines and more.

There is no such relationship online, online everything is about extracting money, with no though to keeping customers happy. We are not customers, customers pay. We are users, we are the parasites that suck the blood of the internet and are treated as such. Our eyeballs are there to be stolen.

We see three specific categories of poor experience.

1) Inappropriate content design to aid monetization.

A move to videos.
Ever wondered why so many news sites make videos? Ever watch a video and think that it took 2 mins to tell you something you could read in 20 seconds? This is not about you. They don't think you enjoy videos, it's maths. Because you can't avoid a pre-roll video ad, because your attention will be focussed on it ( compared to banner ads), they are worth around 20 times more. The entire web as this rate will be 2 min long snippets in order to try to keep paying the bills.

Slideshows.
Slideshows are a crappy way to read, the static images, the scrolling function, the page number icon, all crappy experiences. But what slideshows do best is help sell media. A page with clicks shows great user engagement and each click allows a total refresh of all ads. One again we're experiencing poor design to extract more money.

2) Aggressive advertising.

Interruptive ads.
We now see ever more "advanced" ads. Ads that pop up, pop under, autoplay, videos everywhere. Take a look at the majority of news sites and they've become like plates of sick, with ads placed in each and every place you can squeeze one. Pages take longer to load, we wait for our content to appear after videos. The online ad world serves nobody because we've stopped noticing ads so they are cheap. But bafflingly this means media owners work harder than ever to steal out glance.

Ads as content.
The opposite to the above and more dangerous.Aware nobody clicks on ads, the latest batch of ad solutions are " Native ads" or "Content marketing" or "Sponsored stories", whatever you want to call it, faced with declining profit from digital ads, publishers now offer the chance for brands to co-author content. The current media diet now includes a large number of stories with no editorial neutrality, no balance, we're now scarily on the edge of a world of "news" based on agenda and "fact" based reporting skewing to advertorials.

3) Attention stealing

Clickbait.
Clickbait is so nonsensical and such a dramatic single data point in all that is wrong with our world that it angers me more than every other internet flaw. Imagine how much disrespect you need for your "customers' to write cheap content and then merely wrap it in an interesting facade. It's attention fraud. The only thing that shocks me more than the tactics of the vapid, empty content on sites like Viral Nova, Upworthy and Distractify, is that these sites continue to exist. It reflects badly on humanity.

Promoted Content.
Nothing demonstrates the odd design flaw of the internet more than the circle of despair that is suggested content. There exists a tranche of low class media outlets that exist only to make money from advertising. On such sites ( Answers.com, about.com, and a whole feast of small struggling media platforms for special interests). These sites struggle with their poor content, poor reach and thus pay money to companies like Outbrain and Taboola to drive people to their sites. Is there any more depressing loop in history than to have our attention monetized , only to take it to another site to have it monetized?

4) New content strategies.

Cheap content.
While the above focussed on tactics to make revenue, what the modern internet also needs is to reduce costs. The success of Cats, GIF, videos of people falling over is precisely what has allowed the internet to exist at all. It's the perfect combination of cheap to make and highly popular. We now live in a time of quizicles, listicles, cat pics, and memes because they work for the modern frayed attention spans and cost nothing to make.

Incremental pointless content.
The New York times once used the line " All the News that's fit to print". We now have all the stuff that could possibly get a click.
Online space is free and unlimited, even a story of no merit, so long as it's cheap to make, will cost nothing to host. So even a poor story, of no interest, that does nothing, will make money so long as it's clicked by a thousand people. This explains the myriad of pointless articles.

5) Restrictive paywalls

No matter how much I like Chicken Tikka, I don't want to subscribe to a service where I get a portion of it every day. I want a balanced diet. My news is the same and we now consume it differently. Where we once bought a newspaper or two, we now have relationships with topics or writers, our news is no longer branded, social media becomes the masthead.

In this world a subscription with any single provider makes no sense. We need to find a way to allow content to be consumed with no such restrictive actions. I like many will pay for content, I just don't want to commit to one provider.

My next post will provide some solutions.