Being from the UK I cannot comment on USA Today and how it behaves in ad delivery for a US viewer, but visiting it from UK I was pleasantly surprised that it was essentially ad free compared to some UK "news" sites (I'm thinking "Reach" sites especially), and it had a reasonable % of "proper news" .. as a UK visitor I get eu.usatoday.com though
So I was happy with it compared to Reach UK* sites which are
a) So full of ads as to be virtually unusable
b) When you do use ad control tools to make the web page actually possible to view and navigate, you then see a large % of content is clickbait rather than proper news.
So maybe the nice user friendly essentially no ads site means they get less ad revenue (but on the plus side a user such as myself would not need to deploy ad blockers - though its no defence against people who have everything blocked by default**)
* some UK sites are low / no ads for UK users (e.g. Guardian, BBC) but many are ad hell.
** I block "new / unknown" sites by default, but then if site content seems like it may be worth a revisit I then start "loosening" restrictions, if the site is not too intrusive I add it to the various "whitelists" but if its an awful experience then its back to heavy duty blocking and site added to "blacklists"
Apols for naughty words according to https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/22/inclusive_naming_initiative_word_list/
Its Friday afternoon & CBA to look up whatever the recommended alternatives are***
*** & likely to remain that way, I have looked up the alternatives in the past to various offensive tech words & then promptly forgot them about an hour later. Will have to integrate them into spell check suggestions as workaround for only long term remembering stuff I am interested in & near instantly forgetting other stuff..
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