enabling people to fast-forward through commercials? Nobody should be shedding any tears for the advertising industry, they will always find a way to show you their product.

and only then should we have to watch any kind of ads

I haven't watched an entire ad in years.

Let me guess, you don't read the newspaper either or you cut the ads out before you read it! Also you don't read magazines, or have someone cut the ads up before you read it.
And I have trouble believing you have watched an ad in years. But carry on.

after I realized that over a third of the pages were nothing but ads. When it comes to newspapers I read the online version with adblock enabled.
Most of the TV I watch is recorded so I can easily skip the ads. As for live TV ads is good for bathroom breaks and snack runs, like I said I haven't watched a full ad in years.

and feed 'em fish heads. If they weren't so intrusive, and bandwidth hogs, people would be more tolerant.

Advertisers have always been arrogant and intrusive. People got fed up.

Who pays for it.

Shit ain't free. But keep thinking they are just being evil.

You'll be even more popular than you already are - right up there with advertisers.

Pretty smart.

that's what happened.

People should continue to block ads that take forever to load or are self starting video.

After one video hit me three times with ads because I was dumb enough to test Microsoft Edge I vowed to never watch an ad again.

From 1998-2004 they ruined connection after connection after connection with popups, popunders, kiosk mode, endless loops, and all sorts of other chicanery. They made their bed, they can die in it. Metaphorically speaking, just in case that needs to be pointed out.

that gave pages and pages of shopping results to sift through?

I still miss the scary spinny-gif images, though. And the little 'This site is part of the ____ webring!'. All the little tags you'd drop at the very bottom of a page.

Good times.

Oh, and that annoying little hit counter!

...maybe I'd think about not blocking them.

But these days, ads are obnoxious, they frequently hit people with malware, and suck large numbers of CPU cycles.

So bye-bye. The ad industry did this to itself.

Most of what we enjoy on the internet (and on tv) is sponsored. IOW, the bills are paid by the advertising. Hate on your cable company and their extortionist rates, but they are providing a different service altogether.

Companies still need to sell product to stay in business. They need you to know about their products. They use advertising. When they figure out we're all just skipping over all of their ads they'll just find another way. Product placement in movies and tv shows, already pretty annoying in the worst offenders, will become the norm as advertisers figure out you can't skip by an entire important scene of a movie just to avoid looking at a logo or a product. We'll then start paying exorbitant ticket prices at theaters, or more companies will do what Hulu just started doing (and DU has done for a while); they'll simply charge you more to avoid the ads. And they advertisers will buy up more park benches, bus sides, billboards, anything and everything possible.

I agree that the slow-loading ads are a real problem. I'd rather have an app that aborts any ad dl that doesn't complete withing 1-2 seconds. Force the advertisers to keep it simple if they want to get their message out. But don't for a moment think advertising is going to go away just because of ad blockers. Not on your life.

small and easily loadable / non-malware sensitive ads, while blocking all the megabiting nonsense.

I would gladly take the ads if they weren't slow loading, blinking all over the place auto load music and sounds and splash up over the page I want to read and then ask me 4 times if I really want to close the ad.

Just give me a banner ad that's relevant to me and we are cool. I might even click them.

They pry it from my cold dead hands!

blocks all the ads but still increments all the ad view counters (if there is such a thing)?

but still leaves the advertisers with a problem so essentially would equal the same thing.

Think how many sites you go to per day that you don't pay for. Every one of those sites has costs associated to bringing you their content from web hosting, to maintenance, to making the content, to paying people's salaries.

When ads don't pay the bills any more, does everybody go to walled sites where you need a membership?

per impression so that would not help.

If everyone starts using adblockers many a website will just go away. people aren't doing this all for fun.


I have never used an adblocker because I believe content providers have a right to earn money for their endeavors. Anything else would feel like theft to me.

for antidepressants = watch TV and it depresses you .

Some of these ads are incredibly complex and involve moving animations and flashing and it's distracting to the web user. Some even include sounds.

When you are that distracting, people have no interest in what you are selling. They just want your shit off their screen before it triggers a seizure.

If your ad is simple enough that it doesn't require scripts to run (such as a banner ad), I'll still see it.

If you have that blinking, flashing, noise-making, seizure-inducing crap that'll cause the page to take an hour to load, I won't.