Re: Acceptable ads?
See, I remember a time when web ads were nothing more than a small static (literally in some cases, with the images hosted on the site itself rather than being pulled in from the adslinger network) banner that sat benignly somewhere on the page - perhaps integrated neatly into the header/footer section, or used as a divider between sections as you scrolled up and down. Once loaded, the only resources they consumed was however much memory was required to hold the bitmap image.
That for me was the acceptable, but unfortunately all too short-lived, way to do online advertising. Unobtrusive, minimally resource-consuming, and based around the not unreasonable premise that if someone has visited a website it's because they want to look at the actual site contents, not the adverts. The ads were just there, it was up to us to decide whether or not to look at them or click on them. As it should be.
Then some sites/advertisers started to get greedy, and started loading up their pages with more and more ads, in less and less discrete locations on the page. Ads started to get more IN YOUR FACE, with static images giving way to animGIFs, embedded videos (with sound, of course, back in the days when browsers were trusting enough of web pages to presume that an embedded video was something the user would want to see and hear as soon as they loaded the page, so would start playing it right there and then) and an ever increasing amount of active scripting running behind it all. There were popups, popunders, pop tarts, pop pickers, poppity popping popsalots all over the page, stuff you actively had to dismiss before you could even get to the page content, stuff that would randomly pop up as you were browsing, leading to the occasional (and *totally* accidental, of course, whyever would an advertiser do something to deliberately coerce you into clicking on their ads...) misclick as you went to select something on the page itself only to have an ad swoop in and steal your mouse action.
This made browsing the web rather less enjoyable than it used to be.
This in turn pissed off rather a lot of people. Some of whom had the technical abilities and the determination to do something about it. And as countless companies have learned over the decades, once you do something that mobilises the global army of annoyed techies, the only eventual outcome is that you'll lose. It's just a question as to how long you mistakenly think you can win before you finally accept reality...
So the amount of sympathy I have these days for adslingers and the websites that have chosen to go all-in with their increasingly dodgy ways is so small it could double up as a national standard measurement for the smallest measurable thing imaginable.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
