OK WordPress! What’s With All the Ads??

I have been blogging here since 2013 and enjoyed it.  I’ve watched bloggers come and go as well as  WordPress changes, most of which were annoyances to be evaded where possible.

The latest changes to email notifications of posts by those I follow are particularly frustrating.

Lately I have now become much more aware of the advertisements.

Use to be there were n ads on my posts – simply a notice that occasionally an ad would be visible to my readers.  That’s the way it was for years.

Then not too long ago the ads themselves became visible to me.  Just one ad.  They were placed at the bottom of my posts.  When this occurred I had the power to change the ad if I didn’t particularly care for it.  I had some ads, like one for hemorrhoid cream changed to something more palatable.

This was fine.  One ad I could remove was OK.

Suddenly a block of 9 ads which I cannot remove began appearing on my blog.   Under the label “Sponsored Advertising” it is placed in my blog by an outfit called “Outbrain.”

“These recommendations are provided by Outbrain and may be paid for by an advertiser. When you give your consent, Outbrain makes recommendations based on how you interact with content where Outbrain is installed.

If you want to know what Outbrain understands about your interests, you can access your Interest Profile and review your choices (like opting out, or “Do Not Sell” if you are a California resident).”

“Outbrain Interest Profile is intended to provide a visualization of what we know about our users in an intelligible and structured format, and of the types of data Outbrain uses to make its recommendations. Each Interest Profile for a device/browser combination consists of data collected by Outbrain on pages on which the Outbrain technology is installed. We populate this Interest Profile by accessing the Outbrain Unique User Identifier (the OB UUID) for the device/browser combination that you are using to view this page.”

I really don’t want ads that are of “interest” to me on my blog.

Is this just an effort by WordPress to get me to buy an upgrade?

Anyone out there seeing the same stuff?

Do you see 9 ads below this post??