I recently tried to visit a blog because its author had liked one of my essays.

The blog links on my email notification for the ‘like’ looked interesting: literature, cinema, philosophy, essays. This is exactly the sort of collection I might browse for an hour, opening one post after another as titles caught my attention.

Instead, I found an archaeological dig site.

The essays were in there somewhere. I could see evidence of them beneath the multiple aggressive sedimentary layers of advertising.

First there was a banner. Then an enormous ad covering most of the screen. I tried to close it and discovered another advertisement underneath. At some point I stopped trying to understand what I was looking at and simply closed the browser.

My first assumption was that the blog wasn’t real.

Perhaps the person who had liked my post was a spam account. Perhaps I’d clicked through to some abandoned domain now occupied by advertising machinery. The experience had all the familiar visual signals of a place on the internet where one should probably leave quickly.

But I was curious.

It turned out the blog was real. More than real, it was active. The author had been posting regularly, and the essays really were about literature, philosophy, cinema, and many of the subjects I find interesting.

I tried again.

This time I used Safari’s Reader Mode, which neatly excavated the essay from beneath the commercial sediment. Suddenly there it was: clean text, readable paragraphs, an actual human being’s thoughts.

Success, apparently.

Except that Reader Mode is designed for reading a page, not exploring a website. If I wanted to browse categories, look through the archive, find another essay, or locate the About page, I had to leave Reader Mode and return to the dig site.

Helmet on. Brush in hand. Carefully remove the puppy chow advertisement. Work around the mobile data plan. Somewhere beneath this layer there may be an essay about Heidegger.

Eventually, I gave up.

What strikes me about the experience is that I was almost an ideal visitor for this particular blog. I hadn’t arrived through a random search. The author had interacted with my own writing. I was curious about him. His subjects closely overlapped with my interests. I actively wanted to read his work.

I even learned how to use a browser feature specifically so I could get to it. And the website still managed to drive me away.

There is an obvious criticism to make about aggressive advertising, but I think the more interesting problem is systemic. At some point, monetization can become so successful at occupying a website that it prevents visitors from reaching the thing being monetized.

The advertisements aren’t supporting the content anymore. They’ve effectively buried it.

I’m fairly certain there are some excellent essays still sitting beneath those layers, and I wish I could read them. But archaeology requires a certain amount of time and patience, and mine ended somewhere between the third pop-up and the puppy chow.