I have nothing wrong with advertising on the web, I'm not against commercialisation of the web. I fully understand that the economics of the web require that we trade easy cheap access to information for small portions of our eyeball-time, but the recent trend towards full-screen interstitial advert pages, large banners hovering over content and autoplaying audio/video adverts, as well as the not-so-recent rise of multi-page articles to inflate CPM impressions is really bad for the web, and to me heralds a return to the bad old days of popups and shoot the monkey adverts from the 90's. We don't need to reward this with pageviews.
I know the alternative many will suggest is adblock, but that option is equally as damaging - it hurts content providers as much as gratuitous advertising hurts content consumers.
So please, disable adblock, and next time you find a page carrying an interesting story but with unacceptable adverts, find another source[1] to share, or downvote/flag it.
The web doesn't need this.
[1] - http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=50+cent+stock
edit: I mean: It's a web, a network, in which we exist, and it would be great to reach an equilibrium where people producing content can get paid, and consumers can not get treated like cattle. The alternative is an ever-escalating war between advertisers and advert blockers, which ends up with no-one having a financial incentive to produce great content...
Although as I say that, I realise that the incentive for creating my recently-popular genetic algorithm hello world thing [2] wasn't financial at all. So maybe fuck it just block the damn ads. Hmm. Your thoughts?
There are a great many people who are professional bloggers though, and I think the advertising model really is key to the web - we just need to find a way to make it mutually beneficial (without encouraging click-fraud). Really the ball is in the advertiser's court, but somehow I think they're in it for short-term gains rather than the long-term well-being of the web.
[2] http://www.puremango.co.uk/2010/12/genetic-algorithm-for-hel...