
Why Ad blocking is devastating to the sites you love - HerrMonnezza
http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/03/why-ad-blocking-is-devastating-to-the-sites-you-love/
======
makecheck
Well OK, "but"...

Let's not pretend that the web site is the only party that can be hit
financially here. Downloading megabytes of unexpected extra crap costs
_visitors_ money too (sometimes exorbitant fees if they don't realize they're
on cell vs. wifi, or they trigger data-cap overages, or they're out of the
country; not to mention consuming extra battery power for unwanted videos).

And of course ads ARE ANNOYING. They have terrible algorithms for avoiding
repetition so you see the same _exact_ thing 14 times a day. They are
obnoxious as hell. They tend to do EVERYTHING wrong in terms of being user-
hostile (e.g. hijacking interfaces or trying to trick you into clicking) and
generating noise pollution and animations. They auto-open other pages and app
stores, and sometimes auto-open them _again_ after you close the first one,
until you have to give up and kill the original tab entirely. Oh, and endless
tracking. Given these things, why are advertisers and site owners remotely
surprised that people are taking steps to avoid all this crap?

I'm not saying that it's been easy to solve the problem of paying web site
owners but advertising in its current form is clearly not the solution. At the
very least every page should have a "Here's how to donate:" link at the top to
minimize the amount of revenue that seems necessary from other sources.

------
dynomight
..and the unscrupulous actions of advertisers have been devastating to the web
I love.

------
georgeott
I think we will need to find another way to support sites.

Allowing a random 3rd party to run untrusted scripts on my system is not the
answer.

