Why Do You Block Ads?

flyingember asks: "With ad blocking becoming ever more popular among users, why do you block ads? And with what? Do you view internet ads as different from say, TV ads? What about in a magazine? Do you not buy a magazine because it has too many? I'm specifically talking about the ads in a webpage, but even popup blockers can cause problems with me using a site."

Comments

My reasons

[powerpuffgirls]

1. Most ads are taking too long to download. Even if I have broadband, I would rather use it on somewhere useful.

2. Most ads are too big and intrusive.

3. Most ads are irrelevant.

See the trend? That explains why Googld Ads is so successful.

Re:My reasons

[jZnat]

Which is also why it's not uncommon to be able to get a free magazine subscription. As far as I remember, publishers get their money in proportion to how many subscriptions they sell, so the more the better, even if they have to give away many of those subscriptions for free in order to attract new subscribers.

Re:My reasons

[MikeFM]

As both a developer that uses ads on many of his websites and a user that blocks ads I guess I feel both sides of the issue.

I didn't use ads for years because I felt they were to intrusive. Why did I decide to start using them? Mainly because ad blocking software was finally easily enough available and easy enough to use that I felt that being intrusive and adding download time didn't matter as much because users have the power to turn the ads off. Sometimes I even offer a button on my sites that will disbale ads for the user. The secondary reason is because users have told me time and again that they'd rather see ads than be charged a fee (even less than a dollar). Often I offer both as options. Paying members don't see ads and get more features but the basics are paid for by ads. For a long time I ran my websites completely from donations but in recent years (since about the time of the 911 attack) users have stopped donating. I've not been able to pinpoint the why but it seemed a very strong trend despite my sites continuing to grow. Loss of donations has forced me to use ads and charge for membership as loath as I am to use those methods. Oddly enough I've also noticed the more useful a website the less the ads get clicked. This seems a bad trend to me as it encourages websites of crap instead of making good information easily available. Two of my websites.. one gets about 500 unique visitors a day and contains solid Linux information.. the other gets about 100 visitors a day and is down right now and contains nothing but a notice that it'll be back up after I finish recoding it. The first site usually gets no clicks while the later gets about five per day. The same trend seems to hold among my other sites. Sort of encourages the building of dead-end or confussing websites.

I've tried a couple different ad programs. So far I like Yahoo's better than Google's because it doesn't load quite as slow and the ads pay better per click. On the other hand Yahoo does a poor job of rotating ads but I suspect this is due to their beta status.

Given that I make a living from ads why do I block them? Because they are freaking annoying. I don't read junk mail, spam email, watch tv, or read magazines that insert ads throughout the content. For myself I'd rather make donations to websites I like than pay for memberships or see ads. I'd be more willing to do memberships if they didn't overprice them. Usually I charge about $5/mo for my sites which is pretty reasonable. A site that charges more than that or that makes signing up painful I just won't use. Ads I'd use more if they weren't so often annoying to look at and inserted in inappropiate spots in the content. My perfered type of ad to see is a small paid sponsorship (~80x30 pixels) at the bottom of the menu or page. If I see such an ad I'll more often click on it especially if it looks well made (flashy but tasteful) and related to the site content.

Re:My reasons

[negative3]

http://www.pierceive.com/ has a damn good filterset for Firefox adblock. I've hardly had a problem using it, and it is much easier to grab the new one than constantly adding sites to your own list (especially when you're too lazy to export it to another pc).

Re:My reasons

[hedge_death_shootout]

Hey - interesting story. I tried to find out about it and found this, which seems to confirm the existence of the ad, but contradict you on its successfulness:

[snip]...A positive example of such an attitude was realised in the advertising campaign [for Pollena 2000] of 1990-1996 in the strategic use of quotations from a very famous canon trilogy by the nineteenth-century writer Henryk Sienkiewicz. [...] The high level of satisfaction was gained by virtue of reference to the common archive of quotations. The linguistic pun and the historical scenery imitating the novel's reality took the audience by storm. It was a great commercial success which some agencies tried to repeat[snip]

This makes it sound like the ad worked and the crafty Poles got the reference.

Ehh

[andreyw]

Eyesore. Waste of screen real estate. Invasion of privacy.

56k

[PhireN]

I Block ads because they take too long to load on my 56k modem.

Re:Magazine Ad Overload

[mph]

Or, maybe you want a magazine with no ads. Like Consumer Reports or Cook's Illustrated, both of which sell for a reasonable price.

Re:annoying animations

[roach2002]

Setting, in about:config, image.animation_mode to "once" will finish off the rest!

Hope this helps