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Comment by kbuck | Hacker News Reader

> And some believe that today's ads aren't as obnoxious as yesterday's.

Today's ads are even worse than ads used to be (although the worse ads are less common now). These days, you can expect to have to see a full-screen ad or have to watch some sort of video before being allowed to view the content you requested. Then, once you finally get to view the content, you're assaulted with things like Vibrant IntelliTXT and JavaScript that injects content into your clipboard when you copy text.

I don't mind text ads. I don't mind most non-moving image ads, as long as they load fast and aren't too sizeable. Full-screen ads, video ads, flash ads, and JavaScript junk that modify the page contents are the problem here, and they're only getting worse as advertising companies figure out how to abuse our browsers more effectively.

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Agree that IntelliTXT is obnoxious, but I honestly feel like things are trending better and the online ad industry is growing up. (And IntelliTXT is hardly new.) In the previous decade it seemed like auto-playing audio & video were pretty common... now they are definitely the exception (such ads violate a bunch of voluntary industry standards and are banned from many networks and publishers).

(Disclosure: I am co-founder of an ad-supported startup.)

I recognize this may be an unpopular opinion, but as companies get better at targeting ads and advertisers get better at measuring ROI, the result will be better ads that are more relevant to you.

You're right in saying that annoying ads are getting less common and that a minority of advertising networks have them now. I used to manually block such advertisers myself, but I gave up and started using a filter list after spending several hours trying (unsuccessfully) to block YouTube video ads.

I'd like to support the sites I visit, but the bottom line is that it's far easier to use a filter list than manually comb through the "blockable items" list in AdBlock when I discover yet another excessively annoying ad. I sometimes manually whitelist entire sites when I specifically want to support them, but frequently I don't even think about it (and when I do, I have to consider whether the ad network they're using is responsible enough to stop clients from posting ads containing Java exploits and whatnot). Using a filter list with AdBlock is one of the biggest improvements that an end-user can effect on their page load times and web browser responsiveness.

If enough people start thinking like that, we'll probably see a lot more "content marketing" like what BuzzFeed does. Ads that aren't really ads, but content that somehow promotes a particular advertiser or message. That doesn't work for everyone though and it has some obvious drawbacks.

(Also, I'd argue that making Flash click-to-enable would have a bigger positive impact on load time. But unlike Adblock it might break some sites.)

So you're saying that real marketing (a.k.a. psychologists crafting subliminal messages and injecting them into your brain without you knowing it) is better than banner ads?

The problem with whitelisting is that while I might trust the site I am browsing, I cannot trust the people the site might have outsourced its advertising to. If a site owner negotiates its own ad deals and serves them from their own domain, I will see them as will many other people. If you don't trust your third party ad providers enough to serve their content from your own domain, why should I trust them? I, and many others, simply don't have the time to determine which advertisers are trustworthy and which are not, and if I did, I do not have the time to follow up with each one to make sure they haven't sold out and become untrustworthy.

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