Power To the Pop-Ups 204
Most news and information websites carry advertisements, but usually not more than one pop-up ad, if they have pop-ups at all. This is because the costs of running the sites are low enough that they can usually pay for their costs with revenue from regular ads. Surely the site owners would like the extra money that they could get from pop-ups, if their viewers had nowhere else to go. But if they tried to get away with too many pop-ups on a typical news site, visitors would just leave for their competitors' sites instead. Competition keeps the "prices" — in terms of the ads that you have to view in order to visit a website — low.
By contrast, most proxy sites [that's not a link to one of my sites, so quit yer whining] — sites that you can use to get around Internet blocking, by using a form to type in the URL of the site that you want to access so the proxy site will fetch its contents for you — are festooned with pop-up ads, sometimes on every page load. As I can easily attest, the bandwidth and hardware costs of running a proxy site are sufficiently high that there would be no way to pay for the sites with the revenue from normal banner ads and AdSense blurbs. It's no exaggeration to say that most proxy sites, which enable people to circumvent government filtering in countries like China and Iran (not to mention helping millions of students get on Facebook and YouTube from school), would not exist without the pop-up ads to prop them up. (This may not be true of a proxy site that your high school classmate set up for himself and some friends, but it's true of most proxies created to serve a wide audience.)
Unfortunately it's becoming more expensive to run an effective proxy service that enables users to get around most enterprise filtering programs. If it gets to the point where normal pop-up ads do not bring in enough revenue to pay for the service, we might need a new breed of even more intrusive (and better-paying) ads. More intrusive than the drop-down ads that play noisy videos. More intrusive than the Flash animations that crawl across the screen on top of the words you're trying to read. I'm going to argue that a company that figures out how to run the most intrusive ads of all, could be the new best friend of Internet freedom. But first a note about why the costs are increasing.
Two years ago, I thought the cost of maintaining a proxy site to help people get around Internet filtering, would steadily fall, as bandwidth and processing power got cheaper. But bandwidth and hosting costs didn't drop as much as I had hoped, and the cost of maintaining an effective anti-filtering service has actually gone up, due to some advances made by Internet censoring programs. In 2007, the then-current versions of filtering programs like Smartfilter, Websense, and the 8e6 R3000 would typically only download updates to their blacklists once in the middle of the night. This meant that I could mail out a new proxy site to my proxy mailing list just after midnight, and it would be accessible to the mailing list subscribers all of the following day. (You wouldn't be able to get to them if your local network administrator subscribed to the mailing list and added the new sites to the local blacklist as soon as they came out, but most network admins didn't bother.) As of 2010, though, the latest versions of most enterprise filters are configured to automatically update their lists every hour or two. So to stay ahead of the filters, I have to mail out several sites every morning to different portions of the mailing list, so that the filtering companies generally learn about them and block them at different points throughout the day. Just registering several .com domains every day is not cheap. (GoDaddy sells .info domains for less than a dollar apiece, but this proved to be an ineffective solution because too many censored networks simply block all .info sites.)
There are also the increasing costs of maintaining compatibility with complex sites like Facebook and YouTube. Accessing Facebook through a proxy is still a hit-or-miss proposition. (I steer my users toward accessing the mobile version of Facebook, http://m.facebook.com/ , through the proxy, because it's a stripped-down version built for compatibility with mobile devices, and this simpler version is less likely to break when accessed with a proxy script.) YouTube access depends mainly on whether the latest YouTube plugin for the Glype proxy script is compatible with the current YouTube interface, and likewise can be working one week and broken the next. It's not hard to run a proxy site that provides compatibility with the most popular sites that people want to access, but it takes real work -- you can't just upload the script and forget about it.
(Many users in censored countries also use tools like Tor and UltraSurf to bypass their country's filters, but some of my contacts in those countries say that those tools are often too slow for them, so they end up using proxy sites instead. Since UltraSurf and Tor are free services, funded by donations and staffed by volunteers, the demand for those services can easily swell until they slow down from the overload.)
So what happens if maintaining an effective anti-censorship service becomes too expensive to pay for using just pop-up ads? Well, you could charge money for using your proxy site, but that brings with it a whole host of other problems. You have to set recurring billing in order to be paid through PayPal or some similar service, and run the risk of your funds being frozen if someone files a crank complaint against you. If one user has a paid account, you have to worry about them sharing the account with their friends or posting the account credentials on a public message board. And there are many proxy operators (including me) who would like to think that the proxies do provide a valuable public service to the world, and wouldn't want to exclude people who can't afford the monthly access fee.
I propose that ads which are even more intrusive than pop-ups -- thus grabbing more of the user's attention and providing more value to the advertiser, thus enabling them to pay more to sites which run the ads -- would enable proxy site operators to fund more of the costs of their operation, and hence would be a Good Thing. The existence of such intrusive ads does not mean that they would suddenly be plastered all over every proxy site. If your user base can be served for a lower cost, then you don't have to "charge" as much (in terms of advertisement intrusiveness) to use your proxy service. Over 90% of the traffic to my proxy sites is to domains that have already been blocked a long time ago by Websense, Smartfilter, Lightspeed, and most of the rest of the censorware companies. Apparently there are a lot of users who are on censored networks and who need proxies, but whose network admins just haven't updated the blacklists in a very long time, or who haven't paid the subscription fee to keep downloading database updates. Since you don't need to register 10 new domain names every day to serve that audience, there would continue to be proxies for those users with less-intrusive ads on them. But the more-intrusive (and higher-paying) ads would also enable proxy webmasters to serve a "higher-end" audience, the ones who need several new sites every day, to stay ahead of the more frequently-updated filters.
I can think of several ways that more intrusive ads might work. My favorite would be a "quiz" model wherein a drop-down advertisement appears in front of the site you're trying to access, consisting of some promotional content, and a little form at the bottom. In order to make the drop-down ad disappear, you have to read the ad and fill in the answers to some one-word questions or multiple-choice questions about the content, to prove you actually read it.
Perhaps I'm biased in favor of this idea because I'm tired of ads that contain splashy graphics and expensively licensed music and never contain any actual information. The only television ad that I can recall viewing in the past year which prompted me to actually buy the advertiser's product, was the Pizza Hut ad announcing that you could get a large pizza with any number of toppings for $10. That's what I want in an ad. I give you $10. You give me a pizza. (And this extra plug for their $10 pizza promotion, can be considered a thank-you to them for running an ad that actually had something to say.) Most ads on TV are far less informative, serving mostly to give a glossy sheen to the advertiser's brand name. Yet these ads are paid for by corporations who do the market research and the focus grouping, so the ads must work. Many economists, including Tim Harford in The Undercover Economist and Steven Landsburg in The Armchair Economist, have explained why companies pay for ads that do nothing except look expensive: Because they prove to the viewer that the company intends to be around for a long time, in order to capitalize on the long-term exposure given to them by the ad. This has become so standard that making an ad which actually gives the user information seems tawdry by comparison. The most ghetto-sounding word in TV advertising is "infomercial".
But I think that some companies could benefit from greater exposure of actual information about their product, just as there are companies that pay for informercials. And if a company like Linksys really wanted to run a splashy ad that contained no actual information, and then make me answer some questions at the bottom like:
Linksys is:
(a) the leading manufacturer of wireless adapter cards
(b) the leading manufacturer of wireless routers
(c) the leading manufacturer of wireless monitoring cameras
(d) all of the above!!!
then that's their prerogative. The quiz-advertisement model only says that advertisers can require users to answer a question before closing the ad; it would be up to the advertiser to decide what question works best. I suspect that the actual-information model would work better for quiz ads, but advertisers could try both and see what works.
There are already some websites that require you to "complete an offer" (i.e. become a customer of some third-party company, at least for a free trial period) in order to use their services, but most proxy sites have so far declined to carry advertisements like these. Evidently their users consider this too high of a price to pay to access a proxy site. Filling out an offer is not just time-consuming, but leaves the door open to future problems -- will they sell your name or your e-mail address? Will they make it hard to cancel your "free trial", and then start billing you? The problem seems to be that there is too large of a gap between the "fees" associated with the two options -- a normal advertisement doesn't bring enough money to the proxy operator, but a complete-an-offer advertisement is such a steep price that most users won't pay it. The "quiz ad" is like a "fee" that falls nicely in the middle -- a smaller time commitment, and your worries are over after you fill in the quiz and hit submit.
If the very thought of such an ad still seems too annoying for words, then I think that objection misses the point. If the revenue from "normal" ads (pop-ups, drop-downs, AdSense widgets) is enough to pay for the operation of a "high-end" proxy service (catering to the people who need several new proxies every day), then such proxy services with "normal" ads will continue to exist. Indeed, anyone who tried running the more annoying "quiz ads" would not be able to get off the ground, because users would flock to the competing proxy sites using normal ads instead. If "high-end" proxy services flourished that were using quiz ads, it would only be because you simply can't provide a high-end service for less money than the quiz ads are bringing in.
It's possible that some advertisers would be reluctant to display ads in a manner that users would continue an annoying obstacle, but I'm not sure that's really a problem. The most intrusive advertisements currently in use on mainstream websites are probably the "premercials" that display before some news videos on CNN.com and other news sites. Unlike drop-down ads which can be closed with the click of a button, the video pre-mercials can't be skipped. Since you're actually expecting the news video to come up immediately when you click the link to start playing the video, you would think that many users would grit their teeth in annoyance upon seeing the "pre-mercial", and transfer that irritation to the advertiser's brand name, but there are so many big-name companies buying those pre-mercials that they must believe it's having a positive effect. So intrusiveness itself doesn't seem to tarnish a brand.
But I don't propose to micro-manage suggestions for how the more intrusive ads would look, or how advertisers should tailor their ads to fit the format. I'm just saying that a new breed of more intrusive ads, even more annoying than pop-ups, might be just what we need to stay ahead of increasingly sophisticated Internet censors. It's still technically quite trivial to release a steady stream of new proxy sites that defeat most Internet filters, but it costs money to buy domains and maintain the service, and the money has to come from somewhere.
It's official. (Score:4, Insightful)
So is this a /vertisement or a serious rant? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because seriously:
a) quiz-advert is stupid. I'm sorry, subvert my browser and change who's in control of the flow of information before either I or the information provider can have a say in the process? I would write the firefox plugin to stop that one post haste.
b) this sounds like a /vertisement.
c) does this REALLY solve a problem? I submit to you "gloves". http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Classic-WTF-The-Complicators-Gloves.aspx [thedailywtf.com]
Point? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see the original thought here. Intrusive ads generate more revenue... yep. Some services need more revenue... yep. There are many ways to pay that increased cost of which intrusive ads are one... yep. That doesn't make them less obnoxious and isn't really new.
If you want to use those ads as a way to generate revenue then good for you. Maybe it will work, and maybe those customers of yours will enable popups and other crap to use your service. The rest of us will still avoid those boils on the ass of humanity as much as we can because that's what they are.
I think I see your problem (Score:5, Insightful)
You're trying to serve ads to people trying to get around government censorship. They're probably not interested in the new Maxi Pad with propellers. In fact, if somebody is using a proxy for privacy reasons at all, I don't think they're interested in buying, and thus giving out personal information, for anything. Your business model basically depends on the gullibility of your advertising clients. This is, as you're already finding, not sustainable.
WTF? (Score:1, Insightful)
God DAMN that was a rambling, boring, pointless, content-free soup of barely related words strung together to create something beyond annoying, moving into the downright infuriating. Why is it so infuriating? Bennett Haselton is a pompous douche, for one. Second, seriously, what is the point of this? Is it meant to be humorous? Informative? What? Third, Bennet Haselton is a pompous douche. Fourth, who cares? No seriously. Who cares? Whatever this is meant to be, it's a self indulgent wank fest, meaningful only to, I assume, Bennet Haselton. Fifth, did I mention he's a pompous douche?
See, now, I'm trying to pad this post out to mock Bennet's long winded style, but it isn't possible. Nobody can be as long winded as Bennet Haselton, the pompous douche. And I want to stress here that I have nothing personal against Mr. Haselton, except for the fact that he makes my fucking EYES BLEED when I read the crap he posts. I keep giving him the benefit of the doubt, too. I read as much of his crap as I can before the eye bleeding forces me to stop.
Does anyone have any idea what sort of person this story is meant to appeal to?
Adblock Plus Rocks (Score:5, Insightful)
Even slashdot.org has a nice little comment permantely in the upper right corner: "As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable advertising." I get a real kick out of that.
The funny thing, is I like slashdot adds. It's that freaking girl in a bikini who really wants to meet me that requires the block. If I could somehow allow really well targeted adds, and block the spam, I'd enable it.
The Obvious Solution! (Score:4, Insightful)
Proxies serve four broad classes of user: 1)Dissidents in the world's various despotic hellholes. 2)The bored cubicle slaves of the first world, who wish to stick it to the man by updating their twitbook instead of collating TPS reports. 3)Various flavors of copyright infringers, either trying to avoid the copy cops, or trying to access streaming sites that block their country of residence. 4)Kiddie porn enthusiasts who would rather not be raped to death in prison.
Here is what you have to do: Choose which of these markets you actually care about, either because they make you warm and fuzzy, or because they pay well and don't use too much bandwidth. Advertise your proxy to all of these markets. For all of these classes except the one you care about, secretly sell the users' identifying information to data brokers. For instance, if you care a whole lot about idealistic democracy activists in repressive hellholes, you can finance your great-firewall-of-china penetrating proxy by selling out the facebook users of corporate America to their HR departments. If you want to stick up for the beleaguered lower-white-collar class' right to check its friends page at work(because after they cut your health benefits, man, you have to fight back somehow) you can pay for it by selling out the democracy activists and paedos of the world to their respective governments.
See? A brilliant plan! Why Monetize your userbase when you could Judasize it?
Mostly whining... (Score:5, Insightful)
I have ZERO problems with all the mentioned sites through the Proxy that everyone here at work has to use. His whine is with his script that auto changes or inserts ad's for his proxy to spam the life out of you with.
If I was a site admin that a proxy site was trying to inject ad's onto, I'd code it to break their ad injection.
I have no sympathy for a proxy operator that whines about a site changing it's design to stop ad injection. I dont want my site looking like I support some scumbag company because a proxy company injected a ad into my site to an end user. I would have less problems with it if the proxy companies would inject their ad with "THIS IS NO THIS WEBSITES AD, IT WAS PUT HERE BY YOUR PROXY" but they wont do that.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
But if censorship isn't going away... and it isn't... then you have to look ways to deal with it. His premise is odd, but seems valid.
You response is like saying, "Why bother talking about all these laws to prevent gun violence? Wouldn't it be better if there simply were no guns?"
Chatter, chatter, chatter (Score:2, Insightful)
Apart from the fact that the article is a lot of mindless, meaningless chatter for "internet ads pay for proxy services", I still do not see the need for proxy services. I know what they are [wikipedia.org]; I do not understand why the administrator of the service can't foot their own bill, or make users subscribe to the service with an annual or monthly fee, if they think the service is that important. Dodging the expense issue with pop-up ads is a cheat that guarantees hostility towards the service.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people would say, "Yes banning all guns IS a good idea." They've forgotten that banning beer did not work in the 1920s, nor has banning the plant marijuana/hemp worked in the present day.
Anyway with governments like China censoring the internet, clearly there's a need for tools to get around it.
Fight the Customer and always lose (Score:3, Insightful)
Intrusiveness != Effectiveness (Score:3, Insightful)
The key to running something that depends on advertising is providing an effective platform for delivering advertisements. Effectiveness means that people will actually take some time to actually see and respond to the ad. This is why advertisers are generally obsessed with demographics. They want to make sure they make their pitch to potential customers.
You have to find a way to match up the visitors to your website to an ad that may interest them. Of course, this is hard. Too bad. Throwing up intrusive, annoying ads does not suddenly make your advertising platform effective. If I'm not interested in something, then it doesn't matter how intrusive you are; I'm still not interested. Many advertisers suffer from the delusion that if people just payed attention to their pitch, they would all come running to hand over money. Bzzzt! Wrong! It doesn't work that way. If you can't find an effective way to deliver ads, then someone else will come along (like Google) and kick your butt, so stop being annoying and start using your brain.
WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh okay, let me try to re-cap what he is claiming.
A: I run a proxy so that people can access the internet through me and get around filters. Example: from China access cluelesssiteowner.com to read wikipedia.org.
B: This costs money.
C: I want to plaster this proxy experience with ads to pay for this.
D: If I make the ads annoying enough, I can pay to keep the proxy running.
Is this guy a marketing genius or what? His reasoning is straight out of the Internet bubble days.
NO SHERLOCK. People using a proxy to access a site are NOT people you can advertise to. Why would an American company pay for eyeballs in China? Especially eyeballs that want to be hidden for some reason? Shindlers List, now sponsored by Coca Cola!
Your proxy will either be used by privacy freaks who think that anyone cares what they do OR people who actually need it. In both cases, ads will not be useful at all. The first will freak out at the thought that ad company can read their mind because yes their penis needs to be bigger and in the last case, the people got better things to worry about.
Either find some alternative way of funding your proxy or just eat the costs out of the goodness of your heart. But no sensible advertiser will advertise on a proxy server. How after all are you going to track user identity? Proxies should be anonymous, so how do you track how many unique visits you have unless you keep records and that means your proxy is worthless from a privacy view point.
Really, is the web bubble back again? This is such a classic "I got an audience, advertisers love audiences, I can make some cash here!" idea.
Bennet, you're a lazy, freeloading tool (Score:0, Insightful)
So basically, you want to set up the easiest fucking 'service' it is possible to imagine, sit back, and watch the cash roll in. Only it turns out not to be as easy as or as lucrative as you thought, so you come up with some of the most hairbrained, intrusive, selfish rent-seeking I've ever heard of. To top it all off, you want free advice from Slashdot.
Get a real job to support yourself and set up a proxy because you want to, not because it is something you imagine you can just set up and make money off of without having to do any work. The name Bennet Haselton sounds like an inbred East Coast old money elitist's name. The kind of person who thinks the world owes them not only a living, but an easy, effort free living leaching off the backs of the less fortunate.
Fuck you, Bennet. The world does not owe you a living, and Slashdot does not owe you free information.
Re:Advertisement and anonymity (Score:3, Insightful)
Wouldn't the proxy service run the ads through its own network, obfuscating the client just like with any other site?
Pop tarts? (Score:4, Insightful)
What are these "popup ads" of which the article speaks? Is it something you toast for breakfast?
Maybe "intrusive ads" create more revenue...for the site that serves them up, but that's not the same thing as being effective—that is, actually selling stuff. All I know is that I don't usually see "intrusive" ads on the web. I've made arrangements that pretty much eliminate "intrusive" content from my web reality. Basically, my policy is to kill anything that moves. Uh, well I mean anything that's animated, flashes at me, does any popping up or under or sideways, and does not basically sit meekly in a corner and behave itself. I get a kick out of the /. notice that offers to turn off advertisements for me because I have such good karma (yes this is your chance, oh my enemies!). I mean, doesn't having good karma mean I've been around? Like, what ads, man?
Here's free advice to advertisers: if you want me to notice your advertisement and even maybe click on it, make it a nice discreet image that doesn't get in my way, but shows something I am likely to be interested in buying. You know, stuff that will draw my eye instantly: guns, ammo, camera lenses, computer parts, neat tools, or new science fiction books. I'd even be willing to sign up for a service that plants a cookie that cues advertisers about my special interests, as long as that meant I wouldn't be bothered by obnoxious ads for all the other stuff I will never want. In fact, why hasn't anybody already implemented a system like this? Ooops, time to fill out the patent application.
This is a joke, right? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is this some kind of joke? This guy is NOT asking for help with this article.
It's a mind-game which he hopes will achieve two things. . .
1. He's advertising his site to privacy freaks (well, you and me, actually) who might actually be inclined to use his services, thus ballooning his traffic, thus increasing the price he can ask for when selling to advertisers.
2. He's trying to inject the idea into popular discussion that ads are some sort of Freedom Fry, and hopefully infect the IT people of the world with the idea that ad-blocking is bad for good things.
Sorry, but anybody who is so totally into pumping adverts at people against their will cannot be trusted. And it IS against their will. People who have installed ad-blocking features on their browsers have CHOSEN not to see ads. To attempt to circumvent this, as he clearly explains he does on a daily basis, is a violation of Free Will. People who have no problem violating Free Will, will also have no difficulty in justifying the selling of private click data to the highest bidder. I'd be shocked if he wasn't doing this.
This guy is not a censorship crusader. It's all about profit and personal gain. He may not view himself that way, but that wouldn't be any surprise either; denial is always easier to embrace than a hard truth and the work required to change one's behavior.
-FL
intrusive ads = personal boycott list (Score:2, Insightful)
The more intrusive the ad, the more I'm likely to add it to my personal boycott list.
In other words, if everyone did as I do, advertisers would be less willing to pay for more intrusive ads than less-intrusive ones.
Also, if a site's ads are too intrusive I start looking for a competing company offering the same service. This is very easy for things like newspaper web sites but a bit harder for sites where there are few competitors.
Re:So... (Score:3, Insightful)
So, on the one hand, we have historical bans on easily grown and made agricultural products, one of which is enjoyed by the majority of the population, or at the very least not very controversial. On the other hand, we have a proposed ban (or rather, a strawman ban) on a much harder to manufacture industrial product that the majority of people don't own. Yeah, clearly you can generalize from the one to the other.
Not to mention that there are countries with much stricter gun control laws (falling short of your "ban" strawman, though), that don't have the USA's gun violence problems. So clearly, gun control laws can be made to work.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that bans don't work; it's that they must mirror social values to be effective. Alcohol and marijuana enjoy acceptance by a large portion of the population; upwards of 50% in some places, which is a simple majority.
But those aren't weapons; they're drugs. To at least keep thing in the same ballpark, consider bombs and chemical weapons, both of which are either banned outright or heavily regulated. It also happens to be socially *unacceptable* in the U.S. to possess either of those items as a civilian. So, through a combination of legal and social pressures, the prevalence of such items is negligible despite the fact that anyone could easily make either one in their basement. In some countries however, there's a greater social acceptance of such weapons -- explosives at least -- along with impotent law enforcement, and they're far more prevalent as a result.
I'm not saying we should ban firearms -- I'm actually a card-carrying member of the NRA -- but the idea that bans can't work because *some* bans didn't work is simply a straw man. As with prohibitions against smoking in bars (something else I personally opposed), once social attitudes are in place, then a ban is nothing more than a codification of public sentiment, and it's extremely effective as a result. Not 100%, but (as in this example) smoking in bars and restaurants literally went from perhaps a 1 in 10 prohibiting smoking to 99 in 100, overnight. Without public opinion, people would simply be flaunting the law. Conversely, without a law, owners didn't want to risk alienating customers. The two go hand in hand.
Re:So... (Score:3, Insightful)
correlation != causation.
I will admit that much stricter gun laws would probably have prevented at least some of the school shooting in the U.S. Probably/maybe.
However, I don't believe that guns are the root cause for the gun violence problem. If all you're going to do is to ban guns, you're not really fixing any problems, you're just hiding them (and depriving everyone else of their right to bear arms at the same time). You should find out what makes people go crazy like that and work on that problem instead.
Re:It's official. (Score:3, Insightful)
So basically, you're a shameless freeloader.
So, how far exactly does my "obligation" go, if I'm not to be a freeloader? Do I merely have to allow the popup, as annoying as it is, even if I close it immediately without reading it? Should I feel guilty if I don't read it carefully? Or do I actually have to buy whatever it is that's being advertised?
Seriously, I'm not trolling either. I ask this because the going rate that can be charged for ads is ultimately determined by how much advertisers expect revenue to increase by running them. Everyone who fails to buy the advertised product or service is contributing to the suppression of ad rates, thereby hurting the sites that ad revenues support.
Therefore someone like me, who has never bought anything as the result of a web ad and likely never will, would be a freeloader whether I look at ads or not. And if I'm not going to look at them, why in hell would I want them blocking the content that I do want to see?
Re:This is a joke, right? (Score:2, Insightful)
As one of the people who have chosen not to have my web browsing experience ruined with rampant, uncontrolled advertising, I can say that if a website tried to pop up an ad, mask the content behind some overlay ad with a quiz, or generally do anything that interferes with my activities, I will promptly close the offending site and add it to my blacklist of sites that utilize intrusive advertising. I'll hunt down and add blocking filters for ad content from other hosts to prevent it from being displayed on a site. And I always make sure similar measures are put in place on any computer I'm involved with, at work, at home, or when I'm fixing someone else's computer. I've got a perimeter appliance in place at work and at home that allows for URL blocking and filtering, extensions for Firefox (Adblock, etc..), and a massive HOSTS file I install on any computer of my choosing.
I have no problem doing this, either, because I don't believe in paying to be advertised to. I eschew all forms of television (cable/satellite/antenna), radio (satellite, HD, and regular), and any other form of content delivery that I do not have the ability to fend off the glut advertising on. When it comes to my Internet connection, which I do have control over, I am fully justified in blocking any and all ad content because nobody has the right to make a profit off my bandwidth, processing power, LAN network capacity, and the hardware I have control over without my consent. If a webmaster hosting a site with advertising on it wishes to make sure I see their ads, they can cut a usage check payable directly to me for the privileges of advertising on my infrastructure. It costs me money in monthly internet and power bills, upgrade costs, maintenance costs, etc. to keep my infrastructure going at work and at home. Why should a webmaster, who is using advertising on their site to pay for the same costs, be able to use my time, infrastructure, and network for their profit?
In short, pay me and I'll start letting you advertise to me. Otherwise, I'll filter your advertising. If you make it so that I can't do that through more intrusive advertising, or by preventing access to your content without dealing with your ads, I'll block your site entirely from my entire home network and my entire work network. If your site offers premium accounts with a guaranteed ad-free experience and your content is worth paying for, I'll throw down the money for an account without a problem.