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I started using an ad blocker after seeing a banner of a guy with his pants down, sitting on the toilet. It was for a marketing firm.

A lot of companies are completely juvenile with their approach to advertising. They don't deserve to be acknowledged.

A while (ok - many many years) ago I was getting ads that had pictures of rotting teeth on them. Sometimes I just want to go through my day without pictures of gross rotting teeth. What was it selling me? I don't even know.

I'm reminded of those horrible toe fungus medicine advertisements with the little toe gremlins prying up people's toenails and crawling under. I guess it worked, since I still remember the ad 10~ years later.

You put this well, and I agree with it. I also go further.

I don't like looking at ads when I'm there to not look at ads, i.e. I'm there to read a web page. I simply do not like being sold at. When I need something, I go to where I can get it - be that Amazon, the corner shop or the cinema. If I need something and feel I don't know enough to make an informed purchasing decision, I do research. Be that Reddit, https://www.avforums.com/ or something else.

Online ads are like ads on TV (I haven't watched TV in over 10 years), or people who call me on the phone. They're trying to engage me on their terms. With obvious exceptions (family and close friends) I don't pander to that. There's nothing even remotely compelling there.

I agree. It's not that simple.

Increasingly I realise that a lot of the active hostility towards online advertising could be solved if content creators take more responsibility over the message they "sell" to their audience. As oppose to leaving it to the Big Ad guys.

As a content creator/owner, if you outsource/sell your ad space to Google et al. you are disengaging with your audience and running the risk of alienating it.

Now, I know selling ad space can be a tough business. But who would do it better than the content creator?

My active hostility towards ads are because they suck. Facebook has all the information they want on me but their most agressive offer is for a bottom-of-the-trash dating site.

There is an obvious reason for this too - for most items you don't need to advertise for it if it is much better than the competition, as people will share their stories. So most ads are for a product that stinks.

And advertisers and sellers may (I hope) be forced to think of something else.

And happily they did: native advertising :-)

> Ad blockers are not starving the web, they're a feedback mechanism. They're saying "this particular money channel doesn't work." And advertisers and sellers may (I hope) be forced to think of something else.

I feel the need to point out that the part about ad blockers you're responding to is a small part of a report on the OP's experiment in "thinking of something else." You've taken it out of context.

You are correct, I was responding to that specific thing. I have no interest in typography, or whether he sells this particular book.

I do think his experiment with the honor system is interesting. It reminds me of driving through rural areas, and seeing cartons of eggs in a basket with a sign, "Please leave $3 in the mailbox."

I like to picture you, sitting there comfortable on the couch, waxing philosophical, languorously reaching out to pluck the food out of my child's hand as he goes to put it in his mouth. Because it works for you, right, you wanted that sandwich? It was his responsibility to eat the sandwich somewhere out of your reach? Want to talk about egregiousness, let's look at the entitlement on display in this thread.

Won't somebody please think of the children? That entitlement goes both ways. Who's to say you are entitled to the business model of serving content with ads? Technically, a web client requests files, and if there's something I'm not interested in it makes perfect sense not to request and consume it.

I'm not the one you should be complaining to. You should take it up with the advertisers who fling so much crap at me that I finally threw up my hands and said "Enough!" If you're advertising, then you're running with that crowd, and while I'm sorry if I took a sandwich out of your child's hand, I'm not going to watch rotten teeth, fungal toes (as mentioned elsewhere here) and have myself tracked any more than I personally care to. It's all a continuum.

I don't think there's an RFC that describes how advertisements are supposed to work on the Internet or the Web. These are just something that people have piled on top, and they hope they make money. But there's no right to making money in any particular way.

I'm pretty sure that most of the sites I look at don't have ads on them. Unfortunately, I have to block all ads by default, because the few have ruined it for me. If I visited your site regularly, and your site prompted me to unblock so you could make money, I would do it. Until or unless I found your ads performing some kind of objectionable behavior, and then I would re-block, and maybe not visit again.

I am quite happy to have my visit blocked entirely because of my ad blocking. You should try that, if you need to keep your kid in sandwiches.

I do pay for some content. For example, I pay for New York Times online access. I also block there, and they've never complained to me about it.

I don't feel entitled to anything at all, except to tailor my Internet experience within the bounds of technology and whatever is allowed by site managers.

People using ad blockers doesn't actually bother me, I know it's a pointless argument. What bugs me are people sitting around concocting elaborate moral justifications. If you don't like my site, don't visit it. The end.

In any case, fortunately for you (and for everyone else!) content providers by and large have decided that, rather than spend their time and efforts doing whack-a-mole trying to "block" ad blockers from their sites (something you seem to think is much simpler than it is), that it's more in their interest to invest time and resources in developing more of that same content or functionality that drew people there in the first place.

If your content disappears, I predict that nobody will care. You're a piece of straw in a haystack.

I don't want your sandwich. You're competing with a zillion sandwiches people make for the sake of it.

Your problem as a creator is that (a) creators aren't special any more (b) the rare commodity is reader time (c) the readers aren't quality-obsessed, and good enough is good enough.

http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-aesthe...

Whining at your desired customers because you don't understand the world probably won't work.

This is a problem I have personally, by the way. See the buy-a-T-shirt link at the end of that post! We're supposed to live off T-shirts now, right?

Alternately, get a day job, like the rest of us. Make Money Slow!

The few times that I have disabled an ad-blocker I have felt blinded on several sites and felt so frustrated that I couldn't read the main content in peace. I'm ok with non-intrusive text ads, but most sites have a big chunk of screen space filled with ads in weird layouts, as if they're either testing new ways to get over banner blindness or capture accidental clicks to boost their revenue…or both. :)

Particularly bad are video ads with autoplay even when you visit a site that has no video/audio content itself (sourceforge for example).

Perhaps one solution would be for more sites to use only advertisting that meet Adblock's 'acceptable ads' standards: https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads

It was the autoplaying sound pop-under that did it for me. Fuck those guys.