And as a disclaimer, I get it: Ads make money for the website owner. I tend to put two kinds of ads in my sites: A small square or two in the right column, and sometimes I put in text links in the middle of an article, and that's it. It's about as non-intrusive as I can make it because to be honest, I hate encountering ads in my feeds, in the middle of my articles, in the middle of my videos and what not.
With that said...
You and I get it... we don't like seeing ads in our web browsing. As far as I can tell, if we don't want ads in our feeds, we're more than likely not going to contribute to any product shoved down our throats.
I f*ing hate the "show previews" that TLC puts in the middle of their TV commercial breaks. I mean, WTF?
Personally, if I'm in the right (or wrong) mood, I pause then wait for about 20 minutes to watch a show, then I can skedaddle past most the commercials for that hour.
Any way, one of my more irking... or annoying... or humorous things I've seen is when you hit up a website that won't let you see their content and shoves a pop-up in your face that says,
"Turn Off Your Ad Blocker if you want to see our content." And then it goes on to say how they have to pay the bills with the platform of ads they put up.
But to be honest, unless they get paid for me just seeing ads, THEY WILL NEVER MAKE MONEY OFF ME CLICKING ON ADS. Ever.
I've never EVER clicked on a product ad and never will. I tend to do my research and figure out what I want to buy instead of following ad pitches for more than likely, over-priced or poor quality content I get pitched with.
Face it, ads are designed to get you to buy things, they are not about top-quality products, they're about selling. Case in point, the television ad industry spends 17-20 BILLION dollars per season on the content we see in commercial breaks.
The scary problem is that ads work and that's how TV shows stay in business, via the business structure of raking in advertising dollars. So too, do websites make a dollar off ads.
I say scary because it truly is scary the crap they have for ads that actually work on the general populace.
Any way, most people I know who run ad blockers seem to be of the same mind as myself and say WTF? There are two things I do to deal with sites that attempt to coerce you into turning off your ad blocking scripts.
One: Rather than turn off my ad blocking scripts, I turn off the website. It's as simple as that. Usually the content I want to get at can be found on other websites so I move on and more than likely, since they don't need my patronage of any kind, I will never go back.
Two: If the content I really want to see is only at this one website, I open a different web browser, I surf using FireFox but if I have to open a website, I will use some off kilter browser like Opera or what have you. It will have less information about me in its cookie or data file cache than other browsers and simply put, makes everyone happy.
- - -
Sure, we might be over-reacting about our privacy or other issues regarding ads in our websites. But then again, sometimes, I can try opening a web page and as my article loads, then squiggles down every few moments to make room for all the f*ing ads that spout in the feed, well, it's pretty annoying.
If I hit up a website that just pummels me with ads, pop-ups, pop-unders and what not, I NEVER go back.
I also dodge websites whose ads are sneaky or tricky about trying to get you to click on things.
Off-Subject: I also skip websites who have all these 'click to see more' tricks to read an entire article. Putting in 'next page' links after every paragraph is an insidious method to generate more page clicks so they can sell their website to the bigger advertisers.
I just move on.
The only problem is there are too many people that just don't care and let the ads run rampant in their feed, so those of us that run ad (or script) blockers are usually in the minority.
I mean honestly, no one will ever make money off us from ads since we'll never click on anything, so what's the point, right?
And hence, why add-ins like 'No Script,' 'Ad Blocker Plus' and 'FB Purity' (for Facebook) exist.
'Nuff said.
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