OSNews

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.

We know that in the future ads are going to become more and more subversive and hidden in nature. I would personally prefer a banner ad, over a group of stealth gorilla advertisers posting in the forums, sneaking in product bias everywhere they can.

Although in the case of the OSNews community, I think we'd be surprised to find that all OSNews users are actually gorilla advertisers unaware that everybody else is too

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

Here's a question for the OSNews-crew: What percentage of users are blocking adverts?

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.

Err, we pay for our hosting too. Why do you think we need ads in teh first place? To pay for the company Aston Martin each of us has?

The ads are in place to pay for our hosting. Did you really think we would pay this out of our own pockets? Anyway, stuff sometimes goes wrong, even on websites like OSNews and Reddit. We are not gods, you know. At least we're open and honest about it.

David has just emailed us that the issue is most likely fixed at the moment. If not, please let us know.

OSNews and the associated websites (like gnomefiles, osgalaxy, and many more) use multiple dedicated servers in a dual homed data center. That's not exactly a $9.99/mo hosting package.

Right, because Eugenia and Thom not only have to work for free, but they have to pay for bandwith out of their own pockets. A site like OS News wouldn't last 5 minutes on a free host without exceeding bandwith limits. Moreover, if your sites had the hits that OS News gets, you'd be getting ads too, or charging for subscriptions.

As far as ads are concerned, I use adblock but don't actually use Filterset.g or other lists like that that pretty much block everything remotely resembling an ad. I "train" my filter over time so that the most annoying stuff gets killed, but more benign, nonintrusive ads remain. It works pretty well. Browsing on Linux also helps with Trojans and stuff.

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!