31–40 of 61 posts
The ads help pay for the service. If they are that intrusive choose something else.
I use Thunderbird to check my GMail. Am I freeloader now too?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ads keep the sites I'm looking at funded and available. However, obnoxious ads (flashing, disgusting, NSFW, etc.) are rude , and I will filter them.
But the ads only pay if people click on them. I don't click on ads, EVER. I never have, and have never even been close to. Some people do click them, obviously. Since I'm not clicking them, anyway - me using an ad blocker only saves the advertiser bandwidth money.
On a related topic: what do people think about ad blocking technology from an ethical viewpoint? For me, I think I use the same screwy morality that I use when I'm downloading music...I don't mind stealing from wildly successful artists/businesses, but I'll gladly pay full price for a CD or click on an ad for someone who's just trying to pay the bills.
Most advertising people I have met seem rather dense to me...although I suppose it can be argued that there are more poorly-educated, undiscriminating people out there who are drawn to eye-candy and so forth. Sure, repetition works, you need to create X impressions before people remember your brand. I get that. But overdoing it will cause them to remember your brand in a negative or (worse) unserious way.
On a related topic: what do people think about ad blocking technology from an ethical viewpoint? For me, I think I use the same screwy morality that I use when I'm downloading music...I don't mind stealing from wildly successful artists/businesses, but I'll gladly pay full price for a CD or click on an ad for someone who's just trying to pay the bills.
I don't block ads because I like sites being free, and I want to do my small part to help keep them that way (and to encourage others to put out free content). So I guess you could call it ethics, but it's the self-serving sort.
The ads help pay for the service. If they are that intrusive choose something else.
if you never click on ads, then why not disable them?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing that bothers me most is that Google's obviously trying to be sensitive in not displaying ads to people who might be in mourning and this "hack" exploits that. It's like hitting on women at a funeral.
"It's like hitting on women at a funeral." Am I the only person who was reminded of Ryan O'Neil? (For those who don't know, he accidentally hit on his own daughter at his SO's funeral not long ago.) But back to the point, I agree that exploiting Google's desire to be sensitive is tacky.
The ads help pay for the service. If they are that intrusive choose something else.
this is an interesting ethics question. if you never click on ads, then why not disable them?
On a related topic: what do people think about ad blocking technology from an ethical viewpoint? For me, I think I use the same screwy morality that I use when I'm downloading music...I don't mind stealing from wildly successful artists/businesses, but I'll gladly pay full price for a CD or click on an ad for someone who's just trying to pay the bills.
On a related topic: what do people think about ad blocking technology from an ethical viewpoint? I don't think I've clicked an ad since I was first introduced to the internet at around age ~5 (maybe with a few exceptions for accidental misclicks), and I don't intend to click on one in the future either. As a result, I am saving them bandwidth by blocking their ads. Activating an ad-blocking device is equivalent to st…
I block ads for two main reasons:
Annoying Advertising
Very few of these "rich advertising media" campaigns are any good. The few that are good are overshadowed by the really crappy ones with flashy imagery and music and generally breaking your web browsing flow by overlaying junk across your page. What makes it worse is that the people that commission these things think that this stuff is great and nobody in their "bubble" thinks different. The worst ones in my opinion are those keywords which you accidently hovered over and your browser locked up for 2 seconds.
Crap performance
Ad networks are an utter joke in terms of performance. As they said at velocity conference a few years ago "If you work for an ad network, shame on you." Ad networks don't do simple things like putting scripts on a CDN, not using gzip, still using document.write, not optimizing javascript/images - basically the whole Yslow rulebook.
Privoxy block data
26880 out of 283845 requests have been blocked, which equals a block rate of 9.47%.
(Interestingly enough it never gets much higher than 10%)
A lot of the time each advert takes 1second+ to load. I'm not sure right now about the uptime on this PC but assuming each ad takes 1 second to load each ad that's been blocked that's 7.5 hours of time waiting for ads to load.
On a related topic: what do people think about ad blocking technology from an ethical viewpoint? For me, I think I use the same screwy morality that I use when I'm downloading music...I don't mind stealing from wildly successful artists/businesses, but I'll gladly pay full price for a CD or click on an ad for someone who's just trying to pay the bills.
Click on things you are legitimately interested in.