This week, the Guardian made it impossible to use their site without getting served personalised ads unless you cough up £5 a month.
As a result, we are now asking readers who aren’t already paying for an ad-free experience to pay to reject personalised advertising. Many similar news organisations have been asking readers to do this for a long time, but we have taken our time in launching Guardian Ad-Lite to make sure we can produce the best experience for readers.
We might take a few moments to consider the illogicality of all this. Presumably, personalised ads are a good thing – at least I’d imagine that’s what the Guardian’s sales team tell advertisers, and as a target for these ads I get to see “relevant” products – yet consumers are being offered a way of depersonalising them that’s worth £60 a year.
I used to pay for the Guardian until they joined the Labour right in campaigning against Corbyn in the 2019 election. So I could also take a few moments to consider my own hypocrisy in making what’s essentially a consumer choice not to pay for something but still use it.
Anyway.
There is a way of reading Guardian articles that bypasses the website altogether, thereby removing all ads and tracking, personalised or not. As ever, RSS is your friend.
The Guardian does remain a good web citizien through offering lots of feeds, including a firehose of the latest news and sports stories at https://guardian.com/uk/rss. You can also subscribe to individual journalists by finding their profile page and adding /rss to the URL. For example, the Barney Ronay feed is at https://www.theguardian.com/profile/barneyronay/rss.
In fact, adding /rss to pretty much any listing page grabs a feed. This is quite powerful – with a little bit of effort, you get to personalise the content, rather than advertisers showing you the ads they guess you want to see.
Couple this with an RSS feed reader that can extract the full article from a URL (I use Feedbin, for which I pay, ahem, $5/month) and I think you can create a better news experience than browsing the site. I use a simple News tag to separate Guardian and BBC updates from everything else.
RSS brings several advantages beyond removing cookies and ads: there’s no javascript, no extraneous content and, of course, you get to control what you see and when. I’ve been using this approach for a few days, and it works well – another example of RSS placing control back in the reader’s hands.