Still running - is not a greatest way to describe a business who's business plan relies on engaging a large audience.
I don't as practice use an ad blocker just to be polite to the sites I do visit and used to visit medium pages up until two or three years ago for light fluffy insights and I used to groan a little with the high ad load but not the point I wouldn't visit -- as there wasn't any really silly stuff like including a near 100 meg vidio payload with the hundred words I wanted to read. (I'll just say I don't visit Ars any more ... ever.)
At some point two or three years ago I believe I blocked a scraping API site ... I'm unsure what sites used the various apis, but around the same time medium thought it'd be cool to deal out some punishment, load the page and ads and barely two seconds after it finally loaded it was blanked. Yeah I guess I could have wrote a script that detected when it had loaded and taken a snapshot ... but for me it's easier to just ignore the entire site and surf elsewhere.
I don't as practice use an ad blocker just to be polite to the sites I do visit and used to visit medium pages up until two or three years ago for light fluffy insights and I used to groan a little with the high ad load but not the point I wouldn't visit -- as there wasn't any really silly stuff like including a near 100 meg vidio payload with the hundred words I wanted to read. (I'll just say I don't visit Ars any more ... ever.)
At some point two or three years ago I believe I blocked a scraping API site ... I'm unsure what sites used the various apis, but around the same time medium thought it'd be cool to deal out some punishment, load the page and ads and barely two seconds after it finally loaded it was blanked. Yeah I guess I could have wrote a script that detected when it had loaded and taken a snapshot ... but for me it's easier to just ignore the entire site and surf elsewhere.