# I Work in Advertising. So Why Did I Build a Website Without Ads? 2026-10-22 · Somerset County, New Jersey · Culture After nearly three decades working in advertising, I built a news and events site without ads, affiliate links, or attention-grabbing interruptions. New research from my own industry helps explain why giving readers a little peace might be worth more than another impression. After nearly three decades working in advertising, I built a news and events site without ads, affiliate links, or attention-grabbing interruptions. New research from my own industry helps explain why giving readers a little peace might be worth more than another impression. --- I've worked in advertising since the late 1990s, which means I've had a front-row seat to several versions of the internet, each convinced it had finally figured out how to get people's attention. I was there for the early web, when banner ads were novel and pop-ups seemed like a reasonable idea to somebody. I watched the dot-com bubble expand and burst, search change how businesses found customers, social media turn audiences into targeting profiles, and mobile phones put the whole machinery in our pockets. Along the way came programmatic advertising, the creator economy, endless pivots to video, and more than a few promises that the next technology would fix everything. Through all of it, I've remained in the business. I know advertising can fund journalism, introduce people to things they genuinely need, and make ambitious creative work possible. Some of the smartest people I know spend their days trying to do it well. Which makes my decision to build an ad-free news and events site sound a little strange. It wasn't a protest against my profession. It was a decision about what I wanted the experience to feel like. When someone comes to my site looking for a weekend festival, a local event or an article that caught their interest, I want them to find it, read it and move on with their day. No obstacle course of pop-ups. No autoplay video chasing them down the page. No affiliate link quietly influencing what gets recommended. I wanted the information to be the point. After decades watching websites find new ways to monetize attention, a clean page began to feel less like a design choice and more like a form of respect. Then, on October 6, Omnicom Media Intelligence released research that made me smile. I work in the Omnicom network, and here was research from my own professional world saying that 65% of U.S. consumers actively avoid advertising to some degree. More strikingly, 41% pay for subscriptions to escape ads, while just 6% use ad blockers. Think about that. People aren't merely rolling their eyes at commercials. They're arranging their entertainment and digital habits, and sometimes their monthly budgets, around getting away from them. The study also describes the quieter forms of avoidance: scrolling past promotions, looking at a second screen during commercials, or tuning out familiar messages before they've even finished. Those behaviors are easy to recognize if you've spent any time online, and especially if you've spent a career thinking about what captures attention. To be fair, the research doesn't say people hate brands. Many still welcome a commercial message when it's useful, entertaining or part of something they've chosen. Omnicom's recommendations focus on making advertising better, which is exactly what you'd expect from people whose job is to help advertisers connect with audiences. But I read the same findings from another vantage point: the small independent publisher trying to earn a reader's return visit. I can't outspend a major media company, and I don't want to compete in the race to squeeze one more impression from every visit. What I can offer is a straightforward promise: no ads, no affiliate links, and no detours between the reader and the information they came for. Organizing events by county and making the site easy to navigate are part of that same promise. Usefulness is the product. That's not a universal business model, and I won't pretend it is. Advertising pays for a great deal of work people value, including work I value. Nor does the Omnicom study prove that people choose my site because it is ad-free. What it does show is that the absence of advertising has become something consumers notice, seek out and even pay for. After nearly three decades in advertising, I find that fascinating. We spent years learning how to reach people wherever they went. Maybe one way to build something people actually want to visit is to give them a place where nobody is trying to reach them at all. Source Omnicom Media Intelligence, “65% of Consumers Are Avoiding Ads. Here’s How Marketers Can Win Back Their Attention,” October 6, 2026. https://www.omc.com/newsroom/65-of-consumers-are-avoiding-ads-heres-how-marketers-can-win-back-their-attention/ --- ProbleMattic is written and maintained by Matthew Kulcsar, a software engineer, project manager, technologist, platform builder, emergency-services-trained helper, grandfather, and lifelong collector of broken systems, odd behaviors, and useful nonsense.