One of my daily visits is to MacDailyNews.com. I visit it probably every day, perhaps once or twice a day if not more. Over the years, it’s become my go to site for Apple related news. But today when I visited, I was met with pleas to disable my ad blocker (ad block plus). MacDailyNews must have paid to be included in the “allow some ads” feature area of Ad Block Plus – allowing these shaming ads to show.
I’ll admit, I felt a little guilty.
Sites need revenue. Since most sites simply can not convince folks to pay for access they resort to relying on ads. It’s no different than newspapers or broadcast television – ad supported media has been around for a long, long time. What’s changed is my ability to control what I see, the breadth of information and choices available, and most importantly, the possible intrusiveness of the online ads.
So while I initially felt guilty, I quickly glanced at the abundance of possible ads I’d be subjected too… and well, chose to crank up my ad blocking instead. I disabled the feature that allows “some intrusive ads to show” and chose to block it all. Though, just to amuse myself, before I did this… I did temporarily disable ad blocking on MacDailyNews.com. Here’s what I saw…
None of these ads interest me
Here’s the problem, FiOS isn’t available in my area. I’m not a truck guy. I’m not a cruise guy. And well, AT&T is just a notch above Comcast (which is the lowest of the low) in my book… so I’d never switch to them. So why would I ever subject myself to these ugly, blinking, moving, useless ads? They’re simply of no value to me and well, they’re distracting.
After turning “UP” my ad blocker settings, and enabling it on MacDailyNews again – here’s what I saw.
Yup, just content again. Content that interests me. Perhaps some of it is native advertising, but I’d be OK with that, since it’s still on topic and should still be relevant to me. But all the ugly, intrusive, distracting, and non-relevant ads are gone.
I’ve written about this before… that the internet is an ugly place (without an ad blocker). But every so often I’m reminded of it again. And if you’re going to try to make me fell bad about using an ad blocker – don’t show me a preview of the four ad areas you’ll subject me to. Instead, place a premium on your ad placement and sell just a single ad space – and make it relevant to your readership. Then maybe I’ll disable my ad blocker. But if you’re going to through garbage ads at me just so you can make a buck… I’ll keep blocking them.
