Fast Company is a pretty good magazine and I even had a subscription for a year or two. I’ve pretty much done with all of my paper newspaper and magazine subscriptions, but I have been a subscriber to the Fast Company blog for a while now.

Recently they have been pushing ads to their blog posts and you have to wait for the ad to finish before the actual article displays. That made me a bit angry and I haven’t been reading any of their articles for a couple of days now.

Today there was one that I wanted to read and so I went away for the fifteen or twenty seconds for their ad to play. I’m not even sure what the ad was for. I intentionally don’t watch any ads that I forced to watch before the content that I’m looking for plays. Usually I’ll open another browser or email window and do something else for a few seconds or just daydream.

When I came back to their article I saw that the ad was still playing and as I watched the timer I noticed the ad just kept reloading. I realized that to see their article, not only would I have to watch the ad, I would also have to allow their cookies so they knew I watched it.

Well, that did it for me. I deleted the Fast Company blog from my RSS reader (Thunderbird). So rather than having me read their stuff and maybe click on an occasional ad, they got greedy and now Fast Company can’t count my eyeballs on any of their pages. There are other blogs that don’t force me to watch ads and while not being exactly the same content are pretty close, so I read those.

I usually don’t allow cookies so I may not be the typical website visitor, but it seems foolish to me for a magazine’s website to just throw away any group of visitors. I may be just one visitor, however I may also be more typical than they realize. Either way I don’t see how this will be good for Fast Company and I feel a bit sad for the loss.