Just a little meta discussion here. I have reenabled ad blocking on my desktop machines. I turned it off a while back because I know that ads support websites. I have worked at jobs were we were supported by ads on our websites so it does loathe me to limit the revenue. I last turned on ad blocking several years ago when I was hit by malicious scripts through the New York Times advertisements.
I have, for many years, blocked animated ads as I am easily distracted and don’t run machines with huge amounts of horsepower. This was easy to do when the ads were Flash. HTML5 seems to be a bit harder to stop.
Which brings us to blocking all ads. I am getting an ad from DailyKos that is about a 30 seconds and repeats. I cannot stop it. Every time it repeats it takes me back to that place on the page. On my slower machine it crashes it. So I just block all ads.
I know that ads need to be somewhat intrusive to generate revenue. But there is a balance. And with HTML5 and the current generation of in your face, loud, disruptive ads, that balance has been lost. So I will do what I normally do. Leave the ad blocker on a few months, and then revert to see if the ads are behaving.
The thing that online content misses is unlike TV or a printed newspaper, that ads are in your face. You can’t skip them on netflix, you can’t ignore them on DailyKos. So there has to be a balance, otherwise the impact is lost.