Séamas O'Reilly: From Chicken Tonight to fake podcasts, ads are an intrusion on daily life

"...it feels inescapably weird to reach half-time in a Champions League game and find myself buffered by offers of cheaper car insurance, budget Mediterranean holidays, and jarringly regular injunctions that I join the British Army corps of engineers..."

Séamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

In August of 2010, a user named blue_beetle coined a term in the comment thread of a Metafilter post, about a website which had doubled down on native advertising. 

“If you are not paying for it,” he wrote, “you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”