OSNews

So when there's no OSNews because you've made it financially un-viable, then where are you going to post your smarmy comment?

Well I also blocked pretty much everything too, not to defeat all adverts but to defeat really bad adverts that JUMP, FLASH, or generally insult my intelligence.

Some of these ads come from companies I actually respect, (Micron, Intel, IBM etc) but their ad managers still feel the need to shout at me or talk at me like I was an idiot.

Now adds that are passive, color bland, but otherwise interesting would likely be left alone but most advertisers feel the need to get in your face, too bad.

If these advertisers could get some sense of feed back for how much pain they can get away with before getting blanked, they might learn to tone it down and not get blocked.

Yes, because the ad revenue lost by one person admitting he's blocking ads is going to tank the company.

I'm not sure where you went to high school, but I'd head off to the local community college and take some simple economics classes if I were you. Basic arithmetic might also come in handy.

Edit: Yes, I know you were being sarcastic. For the humor-challenged, so am I.

Edited 2007-07-28 16:21

This may come as a surprise to you, but once upon a time, folks used to actually pay for their hosting. No slimy ads all over pages or anything. If you wanted a web site you paid to have it, or you put a subdomain on a public server somewhere. If OSnews can't exist without putting this trash all over their pages then they need to move off to a public server or shut it down. I have three sites that have been up for over 6 years and not one ad anywhere on any of them. That's right, I wanted a web site so I got a f'ing job and paid for it. I didn't rely on random ads exploiting my users to keep my sites online.

If I'm not clicking on the comments anyway, I guess it's just a waste of real espace.

That said, I don't make use of such ad-blocking sw, ads don't bother me this much... unless they take over the whole website, of course!

If you want to dedicate your life fighting the add. Just so you can save what...

Time? Not really when ever a new add breaks threw your blocker you have to tell it to block that add. normally the adds (5 years ago adds usually hindered the loading of pages because they usually were bogged down severely) take 1/100 second to load it will take you probably on the average of 10 seconds to properly block that add perhaps 30 if you need to add it to your host file.... So in that time you blocked the add it would take about 1000-3000 adds from that one source to justify blocking the adds.

Inconvenience? On respected sites the worse they usually get is a title add, one add in the story and perhaps an add or 2 in the side bar. Granted that is a lot of adds but it is no means a hinderance (perhaps a mild irritation) from reading the information.

What really really need more then an add blocker but some way to determine the trust of an add. Just seeing an add on the internet doesn't do it for most people because they don't know if they could trust it.... If you have a real product at a good rate and you are trying to sell it on the internet it will only work if you have some good word of mouth advertising. Or you need to have an already well known name brand, for online advertising to work. So if we could find a way to have an online registry of the different companies adds and block or accept the ones that are from reputable companies with good marks that won't end up spamming you scamming you or just sell a POS product that hardly does what it says (Well at lest that will block the Vista Adds!).
I am sure my way will have a lot less of a fight back then just the add blockers because most of the adds are from somewhat reputable companies (at least the big ones) the Add providing companies would probably be happier because and work with the software because they want to be trusted and get more revenue. The ones who will loose out are the jerks who are abusing the capitalistic system and trying to scam the public and make a buck no matter how.

"ad"-vertisement

Just so you can save what... Time? Inconvenience?

Many web sites (in general, not OSNews in particular) have GIF and FLASH advertisements that are constantly moving. Their goal is to get your attention--and they do.

The problem is that this motion is extremely annoying. I would rather breath cigarette smoke. We go to the web site to read the article and we are greeted with "Look at me!", "Look at me!" off to the side.

As for time, some websites have intellitxt or kontera ads, which place double underlines under random words. The problem with these is that you have a double delay in loading the page, and the second delay is independent of your ISP's pipe speed.

But on the bright side, OSNews is very kind to put a PriceGrabber panel of to the left side. I think that's supposed to be an ad, but it's awfully convenient, so I usually go there first when I want to buy something.

"Time? Not really when ever a new add breaks threw your blocker you have to tell it to block that add."

Nope:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1136

Just tell it to download in the background and never think about ads again. It really makes it alot easier to read websites without "hit the monkey" banners surrounding everything.

Personally, I didn't start blocking ads until I started running into web sites with 2-3 popups per page, ads that jumped/flashed/made noise, and ads that covered the actual content itself. I'm sorry, but many people simply won't stand for that sh*t, myself included.

Ad blocking *does* save time, I think I established my set of AdBlock rules over a week as i browsed. Hell about 15 rules will wipe out 90% of ads. The hit count on */ads/* is over 20,000 here. and */adserver/* has about 10,000.

No if you want to get my attention then be creative with your ad uri's. TV ads have to try and beckon attention in various ways. These guys aren't even trying.

Heheh... I don't know what you're talking about.

Wow... I'm not the person who typed that 100 "Kb" hosts file, but seriously... is the only thing you can do, checking capitalization? :|

Seriously, that kind of "correction" is just disgusting. And I thought my teachers were bad, who were above me and yet had no idea WTF a kilobyte or megabyte was. :|

Edited 2007-07-29 10:25

Y'know, 100Kelvinbit sounds way cooler..

just turned off adblock - osnews has ads! Never knew....

ads? fvck your ads, why should I enable adverts when I'm vulnerable to script injection? Adblocker stays on!

I dont actually ever click ads when I see them out of principal so you'd not make any money from me. I believe that if a product is worth using you shouldn't need to spend that much on advertising for people to hear about it and when I want to buy something I go do a little reading.

The argument about OSnews going away, maybe that's a good thing? no offence to OSnews, but the internet has went seriously down hill in the last 10 years spurred by venture capitalists thinking they can turn what was fertile educational roots into another television.

The majority of sites, before they are bought out are worked on by people who care, who actually like doing what they are doing because of that and not because they can make a quick buck. Once we run out of decent free as in beer websites THEN we can talk about a subscription model. With that in mind, I'm going to maybe donate some money to OSnews for the times I've surfed their site but in general I hope that advert based websites die a very quick painful death.