First World Problems: Online Advertisments

Some people hate advertisement online, they go so far as to download programs to alter their favourite browsers to automatically ignore them. But advertisements play an important part in the online world, is it morally right to block them like this?

Many online journalism sites don't make much money. In fact sites like Ars Technica and Destructoid can only make their money through online advertisements. Even in the best case scenario the journalists will not make much money at all through their websites, sometimes the ad revenue is only there to support hosting costs.

But due to increasing numbers of Ad blockers sites like Ars Technica have begun to have to cut back. You see the modern ad hosting service knows these Ad blockers exist and will have the advert act a little smarter when recording hits from the website. This means that if you actively block the advert service you are denying the owner of the site the small stipends they make from their work.

While a case could be made that this is almost stealing, most web sites are a bit lax on the subject. They themselves hate adverts on websites and some of them may block ads themselves when surfing.

But now modern day online advertisement has taken a step further in being annoying. A step that irritates me to such a point that I have considered blocking them myself. To fully understand the level of annoyance, let us look at the evolution of ad irritation.

1. A simple square or rectangle displaying information about the product. This can be easily blocked out mentally by the viewer, making it a perfectly acceptable advert in my eyes.

2. The same shape as before, but now the designer of the advert has added some simple animation. While this can catch the eye, it is still in a designated ad space and thus can be quite easily ignored. Still acceptable!

3. Oh look, now they have added sound. To those not ready for this or someone with many tabs open this can take time to discover the source of the sound and to quickly destroy it. Slightly annoying, but it can still be avoided by muting the sound of the browser through windows.

4. Everything looks like level 1 or 2 until while scrolling down the page your mouse crosses over the advert area. Now it has grown a little bigger and may cover some area of the screen that has the information you are after. Really quite annoying, but if you play it smart and avoid mousing over all adverts this are avoidable too.

5. Number five, oh evil number five. This has been popping up more and more, most obviously on destructiod. Number five will grow to cover a large portion of the page (50-70%) as soon as it has finished loading. Not only that, but most number fives will also play a movie, with full sound. The final nail in the number five coffin is when you open multiple tabs on a page and THEY ALL DO THIS AT ONCE.

So what do you do about this? Do you block the adverts that annoy you so and deny the journalists their revenue? Or do you suffer through it?

In the end it comes down to the individual, or even individual page. If you choose to block adverts, try to change your settings to allow adverts on pages you think deserve their revenue, or even pages you use often. Just be aware in the future what you are doing.

- Fae