The News Ain’t Free

Pay per view isn’t always in the form of sub­scrip­tions and the com­pa­nies that bring you your local news are either greedy or stu­pid or most like­ly very much both.

This morn­ing I went to one of the local TV sta­tion’s sites (KING5) to have a look at a piece of video and I learned what it real­ly costs to look at the local news on the ‘Net.

I recent­ly set my com­put­er and brows­er to ask me before installing cook­ies. Mostly out of curiosity.

In addi­tion to the KING5 cook­ies which I accept­ed (at least 4) I have to deny cook­ies from the fol­low­ing sites:

.belointeractive.com
.advertising.com.
doubleclick.net
.atdmt.com

Actually about 12 sites but they were all vari­ants of the above. That’s right FOUR dif­fer­ent adver­tis­ing net­works what to install cook­ies in my brows­er so that I can read one local news sto­ry. Not happy.

It gets worse…

I click on the video play button.

A new brows­er win­dow opens and I have to reject a cou­ple of cook­ies from zedo.com and I still get an advert in the new win­dow from Undertone Networks (for Netflix).

Then I get an error mes­sage sat­ing that I don’t have the Windows Media play­er plu­g­in for Firefox installed — I know I should go and fig­ure out why I don’t have it, and maybe whether or not I have some­thing set fun­ny or maybe the video is in some for­mat that will only play in WMP or… hell I just want to see the video.

So… I open IE7 (where I have first-party cook­ies set to accept and third ‑par­ty cook­ies set to ask,) copy and paste the URL (and deny cook­ies from beloin­t­er­ac­tive and zedo) and click “play” and watch the video. Well first I watch an ad for REMAX. Then I watch the video.

I go back to Firefox and click on refresh — I’d like to get the still that was in the video place hold­er back. I get anoth­er cook­ie notice this one from:

tag.contextweb.com

And so it goes — as I spend anoth­er 10 min­utes on the site I get more requests for per­mis­sion to install cookies.

I know KING has to pay the bills — that’s what the all the ads clut­ter­ing up the site and the 30 sec­ond spot before the video are for but stop-it with let­ting the ad net­works install cookies.

Oh and be care­ful where you click — I touched some­thing. I don’t know exact­ly what and got stuck on a page that want­ed me to “Become a Member” and would­n’t let me go back to the sto­ry I was read­ing. Heinous shit.

I’m send­ing a heads up to KING about this post. I’ll let you know when (if) I get a response.