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Dealing With 'Advertising Pollution'
theodp writes: "Everyone gets that advertising is what powers the internet, and that our favorite sites wouldn't exist without it," writes longtime ad guy Ken Segall in The Relentless (and annoying) Pursuit of Eyeballs. "Unfortunately, for some this is simply license to abuse. Let's call it what it is: advertising pollution." CNN's in-your-face, your-video-will-play-in-00:25-seconds approach, once unthinkable, has become the norm. "Google," Segall adds, "is a leader in advertising pollution, with YouTube being a showcase for intrusive advertising. Many YouTube videos start with a mandatory ad, others start with an ad that can be dismissed only after the first 10 seconds. Even more annoying are the ad overlays that actually appear on top of the video you're trying to watch. It won't go away until you click the X. If you want to see the entire video unobstructed, you must drag the playhead back to start over. Annoying. And disrespectful." Google proposed using cap and trade penalties to penalize traditional polluters — how about for those who pollute the Internet?
I sat down to watch Paddington Bear with my 19 month old son.
The advert that I couldn't skip was for a horror movie.
Thanks, youtube. That was *fantastic*.
I installed addblock because videos and streams I watched had add volume loudness so loud that it was a real problem. I often watch videos during the night and when the loudness jumps up for the adds it becomes annoying really fast. And that was the only reason.
I don't really mind adds and I know they run the content creators, but just that one small issue was enough for me.
Ads are spam. Does spam power email? Do pirates power seafaring?
No, it really wasn't. .edu (as latter became) only.
The internet was invented to be an interesting communication protocol.
Later on, commercial entities and the general public got connected to it.
For a _long_ time, it was
Imagining that the internet was destined to win, and there were no alternatives is revisionist history.
The internet very nearly didn't win, avoiding being relegated to a communications experiment that died likely sometime around 2000.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... - as an example of a competing service that lasted a long time, in the face of growing internet.
Aol, compuserv, and all of the other services didn't quite get joined up fast enough to make the internet irrelevant.
It was quite possible that this could have happened.
They decided that it was in their commercial interests to isolate their services, so that you couldn't email people on different networks.
This (amongst other similar issues) ended up killing them as other than ISPs when the internet took over this function.
If, for example, AOL, compuserv, Prodigy et al had gotten together and made it possible to email other services members, a prime reason for the explosion of the internet would have gone away.
Similarly, minitel could be a model of what the 'internet' might have looked like if the internet had not won.
It would be very, very different.
Network effects are _powerful_.
People seem to forget, the internet RUNS on advertising money. It's what pay's the "real" bills for servers, staff & redbull's.
People used to have their own web sites about their hobbies and interests.. they used to actually participate until mass media came along and turned the network into a TV set. It was standard practice to offer users personal home pages when they signed up for Internet service.
IMO, if ads stopped across all internet sites, or the online advertising industry completely collapsed. The internet as we know it, would be gone.
Good riddance.