Stop Being Creepy!
The biggest issue I have with ads, beyond being incredibly annoying (It was years before I saw a Flash-based ad), is the tracking. I recently created a new Firefox profile to do some site testing, and forgot that it was a 'virgin' profile without any of my addons. I went to one page, and was blindsided by full-audio video ads, which one in my haste I accidentally clicked on trying to turn it off. The next site I went to, completely unrelated, had ads related to the thing I had clicked on. That was amazingly creepy! I quit that profile, deleted it entirely, and created a new one to do my testing in.
I don't - and I won't ever - use Chrome, which is worse than IE 5 ever was, which was historically the most universally despised browser. Back then, I used Opera Pro (yes, I paid for it gladly) which had a button on the bottom status bar that had three settings: show everything, show cached images, no images. The latter could be set to show placeholders which would allow you to view the specific image. Naturally, I used this one, choosing only to see the relevant images. The pages loaded fast, my cache stayed trim and lean, and it never drew down advertisements.
Lately I tried Opera again, and it's just a reskin of Chrome. It's glory days are long since buried and eaten by worms.
Marketers:
- Don't use JavaScript.
- Don't set cookies.
- Don't use Flash or any other multimedia.
- Don't use audio.
- Don't use Unique IDentifiers.
- Don't use popups and popunders.
- Don't prevent my page or browser from closing.
- Don't open new windows or new tabs.
Maybe then I'll consider unblocking your ads.