"The history of knitting, yarns, and crochet"
"Thousands of Knitting Yarns FREE! Get quick and easy patterns today!"
It would be good if there was an option to allow for "Parent friendly Ads".
I will disable particular ads on a case-by-case basis that I consider pathologically aggravating (less than 1%), or when they disrupt page functionality. I also block several types of tracking functions that can aggregate an identity across multiple domains (I find no privacy issues with first-party analytics).
In the special case of floating overlays, I am a strange, strange person. I will not click on the close button, because I don't like clicking on an ad, even to close it. Instead, I will fire up the debugger and delete the ad from the DOM.
That's actually completely understandable, because in many pop-up ads closing it triggers something else, or something that appears to be a close button actually isn't, and so on and so forth. I find these ads to be the most intrusive and annoying.
Instead of slapping ads around the side of your page that can be blocked, you bust some holes in the Chinese wall and let advertising become involved in the narrative. There are tasteful and tasteless ways to do this (Monocle gets it right - http://www.psfk.com/2009/06/monocle-xs-brands-v-agencies.htm...) but you can choose new sources if you don't like what they do.
It's not an entirely new concept though. TV has been riddled with "integrated" content-based advertising for decades. Oprah doesn't just invite that famous author on to plug their book because they're friends.. ;-)
1004 days ago I was a lot more pessimistic about this trend on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1172595 (Yes, I track too many links.) But I'm now somewhat supportive of the move as long as publications do it carefully and focus on the content above all else.
Picking on Monocle in the print world again though, the New York Times had a great analysis of the way Monocle applies the idea: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/business/media/24carr.html... .. the model (and attitude) explained in this article is something I expect to see become very prevalent online.
I'm not UK media trained but to the best of my knowledge, the Advertising Standards Authority has no power to force publishers to meet its demands. What can happen, though, is publishers can be sued under the Unfair Trading Regulations Act for "misleading omissions" (an act that applies to all business activities and can be very broadly interpreted) specifically when a commercial practice "fails to identify its commercial intent, unless this is already apparent from the context".
Context is tricky though. If a publication is particularly vocal about its practices, I suspect it would be hard to get to court. Another related context is when newspapers are paid to give away freebies that are not marked as advertising but the context is clearly of an advertising nature.
Sorry for the disjointed bundle of ideas here but I've just seen how much time I've spent so far. I think this is a fascinating area though and one I much enjoy observing mostly (but not entirely) as an outsider.
..
Update: I did some more digging into this because I know it happens and I know it's not always disclosed.. and think I have found the loophole - http://www.out-law.com/page-4853
Specifically, the ASA code states:
"Advertisement features, announcements or promotions, sometimes referred to as 'advertorials', that are disseminated in exchange for a payment or other reciprocal arrangement should comply with the Code if their content is controlled by the marketers rather than the publishers."
So content produced by a publisher on behalf of an advertiser for pay may still be an advertorial but seem to have some sort of exemption under UK standards. This would explain a lot of magazines I know do this stuff.
Tweepi's Top 10 list of Twitter utilities includes Tweepi itself. Lot's of other companies are doing this too, that was just the quickest example I could find. They generate content that could have value, but also insert self-promotional stuff in there.
The trend I'm referring to is when independent publications produce content that's bankrolled (but not supplied) by advertisers. Content marketing is the same concept but done by the advertisers directly.
Another good example is celebrity magazines that just happen to drop the name of a designer that a particular celebrity is wearing.
Keep in mind, I use adblock (edit: and noscript and ghostery) and these adverts still come up.
But it damages editorial integrity and it dilutes genuine content. In print this doesn't really matter - there are huge barriers to entry, and newcomers are more likely than anyone to do it to make it easier to score revenue.
Online though, if I suspect that [blognamehere] are plugging something shit for profit I'll just go elsewhere for my news. It doesn't cost me a penny, and there are infinite other options.
On the flip side, printed magazines would be so prohibitively expensive without adverts that nobody would buy them, so I guess in print it's a balancing act between alienating users via too many ads or cost of the magazine.
Along with a big portion of power-users, I "suffer" from ad-blindness, so ads don't bug me that much regardless.
The ads that do bug me (generally ads with sound enabled or inappropriate ones), cause me to lodge complaints to sites that show them (if I like said site) or otherwise make me avoid that site in the future.
The reason I don't let a pop-up blocker take care of it all, is that I feel it's my responsibility to improve the web. To do that, I need to know what pains people, but also want to see what ads actually do work. That latter one is very rare though.
I apply this philosophy to all parts of my life. I'm happy to pay for a television show on Amazon, or subscribe to netflix, because I am able to watch the shows without commercials. For shows that were not available this way, I used to use hulu because adblock plus would block the advertisements. Recently adblock plus no longer blocks the ads on hulu (this is probably a filter list mis-configuration on my part) so I stopped watching those shows altogether.
There is a great deal of content that I enjoy, and I like to see content creators get reimbursed for what they produce, but there's no content IMHO that is worth subjecting myself to the psychological manipulation of ads.
AdBlock is back on.
• I do most browsing in Firefox, with no Flash plug-in installed, and NoScript (with gradual whitelisting of individual sites as needed).
• For a few sites, or Flash, I switch to Chrome with its sandboxed and rapidly-patched Flash plug-in, and even there Flash is set 'click to enable' on all but a few sites (eg: YouTube).
So lots of ads don't appear.
I do this for security and performance, not out of any resentment of ads.
If someone wants to show a static image or text ad on from their domain without too much tracking I will see it.
I also switch to Chrome when Flash is required for exactly the same reason. Chrome also gets used for sites I really don't trust and especially don't want tracking me across the web, particularly LinkedIn and Facebook.
Advertising is evil and I will have no part of it. I don't care if your business model is advertising, you wont make a dime out of me.
That's what it takes these days to make the Web not annoy me. Mind you, it's not really the fact that there is advertising that bothers me, I'm just offended by how dumb most of it is. Plus, it makes sites a lot easier to look at.
I also view browser extensions as something that ameliorates the perceived defect, rather than fixing the systemic cause of the problem. I think that browsers should come with ad blockers by default, and if I install one myself I'm always reminded that browsers are not like I feel they should be.
As a programmer, I like clean, small interfaces and good software architecture. My opinion is that putting ad blockers on top of the browser is bad design. I feel like filters like this should stay behind the browser. The fact that browser extensions are browser specific reminds me that extensions don't use a clean, composable, generic interface, but a browser-specific, ad-hoc one. I don't like that.
I install very little software, only what I really need. I chose my software carefully. The decision to install a browser extension is more costly to me than the decision to install a particular browser. I don't necessarily think the people writing the extension are as competent as the people who write the browser, and even if they are, they are more people for me to depend upon. I did try browser exitensions, once, and I learned not to trust their release cycle.
It's all extremely subjective.
I'm pretty tolerant of ads. There are a few ads that will cause me to never visit a site again. I'm gently concerned about malware being served via ads.
I'd prefer to pay a site for good content and have the option to remove ads.
Something like Disney.com, though, where there are about a zillion ads for cruises I will never go on, can kiss my taint. Ditto for ads that are loud, distracting videos on the sidebar, or ads that crash my poor little netbook (yes, there have been a few. My laptop is a fragile flower).
Ads should be quality checked by the site's owners. A crappy ad can turn away a visitor. At least I don't run the risk of that.
Well, sort of. I don't use an ad blocker, but I do block some ads.
So far, my ad-blocking has been limited to placing a short list of domains in /etc/hosts. My main motivation was not the ads themselves, but rather delays in page-rendering caused by slow ad servers.
One of these days, I may get serious. The ads are getting more intrusive ... pop-over pages, videos that start playing audio automatically ...
I also use AdBlock, but unblock certain sites that I like, have unobtrusive ads, and need the ad revenue (TechCrunch, Ars, IconPaper, and about two handfuls of others).
It has massively improved my browsing experience having grey place-holder boxes where mostly ads were before.
Except the advertisers.