Ads Suck: Discuss
There was an article on Slashdot yesterday linking to another article on InformationWeek, about consumer opinion regarding adverts on the intertubes. Apart from the article's hilarious confusion between spam blocking and ad blocking, it brought up some interesting points, namely people hate ads, and some people are willing to go to some length to stop themselves ever seeing them.
I use Adblock on Firefox at home and at work, so that if any sites I visit regularly feature annoying ads that wreck my buzz, I can block them out completely, and never see them again. In fact, when I visit these sites on another computer, I hardly recognise them anymore, as my usual experience of them is ad-free, clean and easy. I also use CustomizeGoogle so that even the big G's "targeted advertising" is thrown in the bin.
So, readers, here's a little poll. Get your friends to do it too, as I'm very interested in the results.
(posts)
4.21-en
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Comments
I use adblock, but can mentally filter out ads providing they're not animated. In the old netscape days, you used to be able to hit esc to kill animated gifs.
Posted by: razorhead | December 6, 2006 3:32 PM
Ah, the old Netscape days... I remember them well...
Actually, no, I don't. I never used Netscape, ever. There was button to kill animated gif's?! That's like, the best idea ever!
Posted by: Matt | December 6, 2006 4:08 PM
I mentally filter out ads even if they are animated. Might get something to leave them off the page and reuse the space, but I don't know how many sites are marked up in such a way that the content will still be confined. Most, I expect.
Escape used to stop all page processing, including animated gifs, in whatever browser I was using at the time, and I think it was more widespread than Netscape. Wouldn't be surprised if it still worked, but most of the annoying ads are Flash toys and it might not work on them.
Posted by: QE | December 7, 2006 9:42 AM
Well, that's what FlashBlock is for, isn't it?
Posted by: Matt | December 7, 2006 12:16 PM
Your poll needs more options. I don't like adverts but I don't block them, just mentally filter them out.
Sometimes the Google adverts ARE what I'm looking for, so wouldn't block them.
So yeah, you need a "My browsing doe have adverts, but I'm not a numpty and understand that you can't get EVERYTHING for free, but I DO think that adverts can work if done properly and if I ever catch the wanker who started the pop-over/pop-under flash based ones that require you to click... well I'll cut his dangly bits off and feed them to him".
So you, I need FlashBlock, cheers Matt!
Posted by: Gordon | December 8, 2006 8:58 AM