Local and major news sites alike, are cesspoools of intrusive advertising and tracking. They’re so poorly built, with so much advertising, that they hardly even function any longer. Even if Google links to a news site, I won’t click. It’s probably 30 secs for my new iPhone to partially fail loading, abruptly reload, and then auto play video I didn’t ask for... while covering the article with more ads that I have to click to dismiss.

Reading about the latest headlines is like sitting in a timeshare presentation, only it drains my phone battery and crashes my browser.

It’s a shame that the media is so bad at producing media. The quality is down, the delivery is terrible, and they want more money.

This venture is predicated on the assumption that Google and the publishers both need each other: publishers want revenue from ads, revenue whose amount is proportional to the number of viewers, while Google wants quality destinations to which it can direct traffic and/or quality sources of content which it can display in a captive newsreader.

This is a reality in a world where paid newspaper subscriptions are down, media makes money with just-in-time auctioned online display ads, and paywalls interfere with the positive effects of wide distribution, like the likelihood of new customer acquisition.

[1] https://www.ampproject.org/ [2] https://contributor.google.com/ [3] https://fundingchoices.google.com [4] https://github.com/WICG/webpackage