The Cynic Says……

Ok, I understand that people have to find some way to bring in revenue to support their websites when they get larger and start developing more traffic but DAMN there are tons of ads on what seems like nearly every website I visit these days. Amusingly, I normally run Firefox 1.5 with the adblock extension so I don’t even notice them but I decided to fire up Opera 9.0 preview just for fun and that was when I realized just how pervasive they really are. I don’t really mind google’s ads too much because they’re relatively small and unobtrusive. Not only that, they’re text-based. The ones that annoy me are the huge 128×128 pixel animated advertisements. Seriously, there’s absolutely no need for such huge advertisements! I go to Pandora to listen to some music and see one of those very ads in the top right corner blasting me in the face. Normally in firefox I never see the ad so I didn’t even know it was there until just tonight. I go to Neowin to browse the forums and see a google adwords banner in the header image. I don’t mind this quite as much since it’s text-based but the way it’s aligned looks atrocious. Heck, even my favorite news site (digg) has a big honkin’ google ad banner across the top. I think the ones that annoy me most are the ones that are inline with the content I’m trying to read. Like I’m reading an article and slapped right in the middle of that sucker is a big square ad that the text is wrapped around. They’re really hard to miss and while that’s obviously the point, I find it rather annoying to say the least. Ads along the outside of the content aren’t quite as bad because I can focus my eyes on the actual article and not notice the ads off to the sides until I finish reading. Needless to say, I won’t be giving up my adblock extension for Firefox anytime soon. I understand webmasters’ reasoning for having them… doesn’t mean I like it though