Over those nine slugfest years, battling big media and the odd crooked government official, we certainly attracted the attention of South Africa’s most desirable readers. In the offline world, Daily Maverick readers would be worth a sizeable portion of the Ingonyama Trust. But the migration from print to digital went straight into the pockets of the Silicon Valley giants, mostly Google & Facebook, who had the scale to undercut any news publisher on price and owned enough data mined from our activities and profiles to know when we wanted to buy stuff before we even knew ourselves.

The subsequent decline in digital advertising rates is the reason you will often see some publishers vomit up to 20 different ads on a single page – each one screaming for your attention convincing you of the Lazarus-like healing qualities of toenail cream or how Trevor Noah makes R20k a second from this sideline gig YOU can do at home, in your underpants.

At Daily Maverick we took the decision to respect our readers, limiting the number of ads per page (for many years just a single advert per page) and limited advert animation to 15 seconds. The effectiveness of this unique approach meant click-through rates that were never before seen globally. We expected many in the industry to follow suit. But when the “industry” is quite literally the entire internet, we were never going to move the needle that was sliding into the abyss – lubricated by toenail cream and fake news adverts.

Fixing what is wrong with digital advertising may not happen in our lifetime, but there is something seriously awry with the ecosystem controlled by black boxes that encourage and enable levels of fraud that would make Atul and Ajay feel amateurish. Fraudsters can get away with billions while news publishers slug it out for scraps in an attempt to sustain newsrooms under economic, political and, sometimes, physical attacks.

In response, many new media startups have abandoned advertising completely as a revenue stream, a notion that would have seemed unthinkable in the pre-thumb scroll era. Dutch news outfit De Correspondent successfully raised $1.7-million from 19,000 members in 2013 and is encouraging global readers to raise the $2.5-million it needs to expand into the US market. All without a single cent from advertising.

Earlier this year when we surveyed readers who had previously donated to Daily Maverick, we asked them to rate which benefits they valued most and would entice them to become Maverick Insiders. Coming in second, just behind the opportunity to engage with our rock star team, was the ability to browse Daily Maverick free of banner adverts. And being of the listening kind, we set out to redesign our homepage, article and opinion templates without the space allowed for banner adverts.

Results of the Daily Maverick donor survey, July 2018

We could have simply blocked the adverts from showing but that would have made for a nasty user experience, instead we invested in a redesign so that articles still look good and the copy is realigned; additionally, the pages render faster without having to load the ad unit containers.

As of today, all Maverick Insiders who sign-in to the website will experience ad-free browsing by default. If you find you miss adverts and the messages from people who support Daily Maverick through advertising you can switch them back on by going to the preferences section of your profile and ticking the box to allow adverts again.

For those of you of who are not yet Maverick Insiders, ad-free browsing is just one of the great benefits of joining the cool kids. Besides helping to keep Daily Maverick, Scorpio and Zapiro free for a society that so desperately needs it, pretty soon Maverick Insiders will be able to comment on articles. They are already getting R100 in Uber vouchers every month until October 2019 (if you choose the R150 per month option).

So if you don’t like ads, and want to do something to help an organisation fighting for your democracy/future, you can sign-up to support us here.

It will be well worth it. DM