arstechnica.com — Did you know that blocking ads truly hurts the websites you visit? We recently learned that many of our readers did not know this, so I'm going to explain why. There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never...
Mar 6, 2010 View in Crawl 4
enantiodromiaMar 8, 2010
right. and it's the choice of your favorite free websites to go to a subscriber model because of selfish "i want it all and for free" people like you.
nascenttMar 9, 2010
I've been using adblock for years. I see no screwed up pages because of it.
filmfreak22Mar 10, 2010
@DanielPhermous:If he's trolling, he's trolling the writer of the article, who isn't here, so I don't think it really matters. Anyway, I figure d62600 is fed up with ads and he's venting, not trolling. I used to feel the same way about telemarketers until the national phone registry started (thank God). Actually, I still hate telemarketers, especially ones saying they are non-profit when they're not just to get around the registry laws.Maybe we can have an international registry for blocking annoying and computer resource hogging ads, and if they violate this they get to pay us a fine, just like the national phone registry. O.k., it's not going to happen, but I can dream, can't I?
ole1kanobeMar 11, 2010
Couldn't agree more. A lot of these flash ads can run the code to get malware onto your pc and bam, you have a cleanup job on your hands.If web sites would stop utilizing companies that rely on second, third or deeper party advertisers, maybe it could be safe to have advertisements load when you go to a web page. Zedo is one of those companies that rely on that business model. They don't care what happens when one of their ads gets displayed, only that the source is paying them. It's become a large enough problem here at my job that we regularly go through the search engines looking for ad agencies, check them out and blacklist all the domains we can find that they use to deliver their ads.Maybe if web site owners would responsibly choose their advertisers instead of outsourcing the job their ads may not get blocked.
deathtapMar 11, 2010
I agree as well. If ads were text, like Google's ads, then I wouldn't block them. I mean, I don't mind animated ones either. Sometiems they are pretty funny. But ads with sounds? No. Never. Unacceptable.With the exception of a 15 second video ad. Any more than 15 seconds, and I probably won't ever visit the site again.
eddehMar 12, 2010
I wouldn't use adblock if flash wasn't used so excessively. On some sites I see at least one core going over 50% just for serving the demanding flash animations for all those ads. That's enough to bring a 2yo laptop to it's knees...
sylocatMar 13, 2010
Q: What do you call a kid who has just read "Atlas Shrugged" for the first time?A: A Libertarian economist.
nitoriMar 14, 2010
Here's an idea don't use annoying floating window ads and noisy cpu hogging flash ads they are the main reason I use an ad blocker.Site that have that crap get their ads blocked.None flash ads that stay put and do not run across my screen like a c**kroach I will tolerate.