| I was always a defender of a site's right to use advertising in lieu of any better way to pay for its content. As someone who'd had stabs in the past at making content sites with useful content, I understood that it was a case of etiquette. If you want to read my content, do me the courtesy of allowing an unobtrusive text ad to exist off to the side. On that basis, I never blocked ads. Sometimes the ads were even interesting. I use an ad blocker now. Too many abuses of my willingness to let the publishers show me ads and I eventually just got sick of it. Where the line was crossed for me included: - Videos (or audio) autoplaying over the top of my own music; especially when they're in some other tab, halfway down the page, forcing me to go hunting to figure out where the sound was coming from - Links commandeered by popup launchers; especially when they cancel the original click, or load my link in a new tab and override the current tab with the ad popup, which often resulted in me accidentally leaving the ad tab open while I closed the tab I actually wanted. - Hover ads that activate because I was careless enough to not pay precise attention to the location of my mouse pointer - Page content scroll positions jerking up and down as ads appear or disappear (usually just the former) - Overlay ads appearing on top of content I'm trying to read, and in particular those which make the close button either hard to see, unresponsive when clicked, or which respond as though I've clicked the ad itself - Content that just won't display because it's blocked by ad resources that have stalled while loading And so forth. I'll stand up for publisher's rights, but only to a point. Eventually the noise and bad behaviour just becomes too much. |