For the last month I embarked on an experiment – I disabled AdBlock Plus (normally the first FireFox extension I install) in an attempt to be more supportive of the sites I visit on a daily basis.
The argument against AdBlock and similar technologies is perfectly simple – websites rely on advertising to monetize and support their content production – blocking the ads means you’re effectively removing any chance the content provider has of making any money out of your visit.
I’ve never been a web advertisers’ dream client anyway – I rarely click ads due to many years of acutely developed online paranoia and the general temperament of knowing what I want generally rendering my click through rate as close to a big fat zero as possible but I thought I’d give it a go.
The first thing that I noticed was the pervasion of ads on sites that I’d taken to be “light” advertising providers. There were 100s of the things dogging every page on pretty much every site I visited. Some were quite subtle and non invasive – others included Flash so weighty it slowed my browser to a crawl and even used autoplay video with sound to overlay the content I was viewing. The worst forms of advertising though were the pop-ups that pervaded some of the larger sites.
The last time I exposed myself to online advertising it was dominated by Google AdSense and the occasional animated GIF – now it seems as if the burning desire to monetize and capitalise content has drive site owners to extreme lengths to get their ads displayed and clicked on.
Suffice to say in this new climate of pop-ups and invasive multimedia advertising I’ve had little choice but to re-enable AdBlock Plus and enjoy the relative peace that it brings to the net – my apologies to ad supported sites but, unless you can find a less annoying (and potentially risky) method to pay your hosting bills, I’m not going to be contributing.
Footnote: Whilst writing this post I was reminded of a short story by one of my favourite authors Philip K Dick entitled Sales Pitch (part of the Golden Man Collection
) in which advertising has “evolved” to the point that the daily commute is a run through a barrage of targeted advertising beamed directly into the minds of the targets. At the end of the story the hero takes his own life rather than be subjected to the constant invasion of his life … perhaps in this light my re-enabling a FireFox extension is not so bad!
