Essentially, it's a way for a site's users to bid for its ad spots. If you bid more than the advertisers, you don't have to see the ads.
It's quite a clever idea really, but I don't think it has much uptake from publishers.
It's too bad there wasn't some way to have it cross over networks too.
Also you could just use an add block
That's a (rather quickly) learned behavior called banner blindness. :) [1] People get used to the locations where ads are placed on web pages and also the kind of look that ads have (flashy, colorful, animation, tiny picture with some text, etc., as some examples) and don't even look at them (these have been confirmed by eye tracking studies a long time ago).