if you never click on ads, then why not disable them?
The threshold for the terms "clever" and "hack" must have dropped.
The interviewer said they'd be happy to just not show any ads on such pages and asked me how I'd go about detecting them. Apparently they've (mostly) figured that out by now!
For me, I think I use the same screwy morality that I use when I'm downloading music...I don't mind stealing from wildly successful artists/businesses, but I'll gladly pay full price for a CD or click on an ad for someone who's just trying to pay the bills.
When I 'm satisfied of your service I won't to give back something. Maybe I don't have money, but something I can contribute.
Go to Settings -> Web Clips and untick 'Show my web clips above the Inbox'.
Ads to a blog post I guess those are what you'd call them?!?
Most advertising people I have met seem rather dense to me...although I suppose it can be argued that there are more poorly-educated, undiscriminating people out there who are drawn to eye-candy and so forth. Sure, repetition works, you need to create X impressions before people remember your brand. I get that. But overdoing it will cause them to remember your brand in a negative or (worse) unserious way.
Constructive feedback is always good. "Your ad in location XY is loading very slowly." "The ad for product Z is misbehaving and causing a redirect/hang/whatever." As long as it isn't annoying comments like "I don't like ads, you should remove them" or "It moves. Can't you just use ads that I don't notice?" Those are pointless, because they hinge on the concept that ads are fine as long as nobody sees them, which goes against the whole point of ads.
Click on things you are legitimately interested in.
I don't think I've clicked an ad since I was first introduced to the internet at around age ~5 (maybe with a few exceptions for accidental misclicks), and I don't intend to click on one in the future either. As a result, I am saving them bandwidth by blocking their ads.
Activating an ad-blocking device is equivalent to stating "I do not intend to click on your ads," and as a result it cannot possibly be losing the advertiser money.
(If the site charges per impression instead of per click, that's another thing, but those are rare these days.)
But even for cost-per-click views matter. If you have more views, you can get into better programs.
But most of all, you deprive the site and the advertiser of the opportunity to make money of off you. If you don't click a specific advertisement: fine. Then it's the publisher's job or the advertiser's job to find ads that do get them value out of your visit. If you "opt-out" of ads, they don't have that opportunity and you've become worthless to them. A freeloader with no potential of ever being worth something. The site would be better of by blocking you...
I never click on ads, but I know impressions do work on me, lodging brand names into my head and all that.
It seems a bit odd to me if advertisers suddenly start ignoring the value of impressions.
I block ads for two main reasons:
Annoying Advertising
Very few of these "rich advertising media" campaigns are any good. The few that are good are overshadowed by the really crappy ones with flashy imagery and music and generally breaking your web browsing flow by overlaying junk across your page. What makes it worse is that the people that commission these things think that this stuff is great and nobody in their "bubble" thinks different. The worst ones in my opinion are those keywords which you accidently hovered over and your browser locked up for 2 seconds.
Crap performance
Ad networks are an utter joke in terms of performance. As they said at velocity conference a few years ago "If you work for an ad network, shame on you." Ad networks don't do simple things like putting scripts on a CDN, not using gzip, still using document.write, not optimizing javascript/images - basically the whole Yslow rulebook.
Privoxy block data
26880 out of 283845 requests have been blocked, which equals a block rate of 9.47%.
(Interestingly enough it never gets much higher than 10%)
A lot of the time each advert takes 1second+ to load. I'm not sure right now about the uptime on this PC but assuming each ad takes 1 second to load each ad that's been blocked that's 7.5 hours of time waiting for ads to load.
On other machines, only those ads with movement get blocked. Look, if you can't get a message that's interesting in text while I'm already reading, then you don't have a product I'd want to buy.
Ever.
To the extent that I'm freeloading by continuing to patronize sites after blocking ads, I justify by directing other people to those sites when I see interesting content.
In the case of Gmail, Google can easily absorb the cost of my not seeing ads. If they don't want to do that, they shouldn't provide free webmail.
Want a job programming OCaml?
Faster than FFTW
Anyway, I have no problem clicking ads if they're relevant and for something I really want to learn more about. It's just that they rarely are.
Am I the only person who was reminded of Ryan O'Neil? (For those who don't know, he accidentally hit on his own daughter at his SO's funeral not long ago.)
But back to the point, I agree that exploiting Google's desire to be sensitive is tacky.
It's probably the other way around: You have an Ad Blocker, so you don't click on ads.