Author: Andrew

I can understand and sympathize with the general distaste for pop-up advertisements. They are obstructive and annoying. But I do not sympathize with the distaste of standard banner advertisements that pay for all the free content we currently enjoy.

Again the idealists fail to understand how websites pay for their monthly server and bandwidth charges. For most "free" sites their revenue is generated through advertisements. Other sites use subscription services and the rest eat the cost. The ones eating the cost have another source of revenue usually not Internet based.

Since day one, I've understood the back end reason for banner ads. They are a necessity of free content. Lets be honest any web savvy user generally ignores all ads that they choose. So pushing features such as Adblock is harmful to the Internet, as we know it.

While Adblock is nothing new in terms of ad blocking software, it is significant in that it's current hype and price (free) is making it widely recommended and used as an extension to the Firefox Web Browser. This is a dangerous trend.

"Adblock is a content filtering plug-in for the Mozilla and Firebird browsers. It is both more robust and more precise than the built-in image blocker."

Adblock effectively robs these free sites of their revenue. If Internet Explorer came with a feature such as Adblock, you would effectively wipe out thousands of websites, maybe more. These are the same free sites users of Adblock frequently visit. The irony is how this is self-defeating.

The Future
If features such as Adblock become commonplace you will force an unnecessary outcome, one in which free sites deliver their content in a way that only disabling Adblock will display the content. Web Sites that depend on advertising as their primary source of revenue should take notice.

Poll: How Should Ad blockers be used?

Banner advertisements are fine, and not the target of ad-block.

The target is all of the extra pop-up ads and so called "rich-media" ad's that sites are so fond of these days. Nothing annoys me more than a Flash Based ad that starts a commercial in the middle of my browsing session. That deserves to get blocked as it both uses my bandwidth and scares the hell out of me.

Google seems to be doing fine with its Adsense program, and text based ad's in its searches and accross all the servies it provides. Not on of their ad's has ever bothered me and I have seen no reason to block their iframe.

Adblock blocks all ads or at least tries to. I think that is why they called it that?

Ad-block, blocks additional popups, and whatever else you tell it to block. So lets say I don't want that flash animation on the page, I right click it and say ad-block.

Those Ad's By Gooooogle, generally are still unblocked, unless I choose to block the iframe.

So really, its left up to the user to decide how aggressively they want to block ads.

Think of the dial up user who has to deal with the extra loading time a flash ad or other rich media takes to load on a page.

Also think of all those amature webpage designers who go crazy with their banner ad's and other such insanity. It's nice to be able to take distracting elements away. A banner ad is not distracting, but 4 banner ad's and a few inline ad's are rediculous.

Like I said if things like this become more common place you will see free content presented in a form that forces the display of the ads. I've never had a problem with ads unless they are popups.

I have an ad blocker in AvantBrowser but do not bother turning it on since all I am concerned about are the pop-ups.

And then someone else will get annoyed and write a peice of software that finds a way to block those ad's. It's a vicious circle.

Of course, for an extreme solution in the mean time you can just block all images.

The way I invision it will be impossible to filter the ad content from the free content.

Sort of like the way Google does it's books website? Where there is an overlay above the book page, and you can't directly touch the bookpage.

So we can have webpages that are not directly "touchable" and can therefore have the ad content placed in line?

CRY ME A RIVER!!!!! Are you for real?

Do you switch the channel between shows?