Ad bad

I was reluctant to switch on an ad blocker for the longest time, but what really did it for me was seeing “1 trick of a flat belly” and its associates All. The. Time. Fake download buttons are also horrible. Maybe if sites started collectively taking a stand against that kind of thing I might reconsider, but no one seems to be stepping up.

Google’s ads had such promise once – unobtrusive, text-only, sometimes even relevant and informative. What happened?

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[quote=“robotech, post:20, topic:58033, full:true”]
But this doesn’t keep them from angrily bawling out their own customers, the people who come to their sites repeatedly to read the content they provide, as thieves. [/quote]
I don’t think that you understand how commercial media works. The website viewers are not the customers. The advertisers are the customers. The website viewers are the product.

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I turned my adblocker off for a website I wanted to support, once. Within a minute, my browser was redirected to a “your computer has been infected, install our malware to remove it!” attack page.

I turned it off, and have kept it off since. If there was a setting that permitted only static images and text ads, no scripting, JS, Flash, animated gifs, or other nonsense, then yes, I’d turn that on for sites I wanted to support.

Dear webmasters: consider trialing an opt-in system to offer visitors text-and-static-image-ads-only, no animations, popup divs or scripting.

Profit will be: your normal profit

  • (people not being driven from your site by the ads)
  • (people whitelisting your site for the barebones ads)
  • (cost of coding the ‘show me only basebones ads’ option)
  • (people switching from watching better-paying screw-the-user ads)

In the majority of cases (people who don’t care about ads or tweaking user settings; people who always adblock everything) there’ll be no change, but I think profits might increase a little.

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The ad isn’t full screen [depending on monitor size.]

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