Is This More Insulting to the Author or the Reader?

You know how there’s that commercial where the woman is pregnant and the other woman asks her if she’s finding the adjustment weird, based on having to avoid eating different things, and the first woman just starts spouting off random facts about fish?  I can’t remember what product the commercial is for, but it’s supposed to be illustrating how search engines bring you back a lot of weird, irrelevant information.

I kind of like that search engines can send you down strange paths.

But I believe I have found an on-line item that epitomizes the worst the web has to offer in terms of weird and irrelevant stuff.

And it comes from CNN.

Have they not rendered that piece almost completely unreadable?  It’d be hilarious except that there seems to be a poignant piece under the apparatus of advertising.

I can’t imagine writing something like that only to discover that, right at the emotional peaks of the piece, Real Simple has inserted a perky-voiced ad for itself.

And I can barely read it.

This is the problem when good writing becomes just another vehicle for delivering eyes to advertisers.  The advertisers don’t care if your eye can’t actually get to the content.

It’s really gross.