[zeta0134]

While I appreciate your viewpoint on adblockers, being in the advertising business yourself, that is not enough of an argument to convince me to disable mine. I find the entire practice of invasive advertising to be a huge disservice to users in general.

There is one type of ad my ad blocker regularly fails to block: original, vetted content put in place by the site owner, that does not come from a third party. "Sponsored" posts on blogs, recommendations in youtube videos, even textual links at the bottom of some blog articles. This content comes from the website, is organic and difficult to detect (because it is not served in some mass campaign) and is usually far more relevant than any rotating ad space I've ever seen.

I think my distaste for internet advertising mostly is a distaste for intrusive things that dance and distract, trying to steal my focus from the content I arrived on the page to consume. But the reason I run an ad blocker is because I do not trust third-party embedded content on my pages, and there have been way to many cases of malware being distributed via the advertising networks for me to ever really trust them again.

[kasey_junk]

The online ad industry is already gearing up to monetize/systemize/data mine "organic" sponsorships. The third part aspect will just be more hidden.

I'm not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing but the ad industry absolutely wants to make ad content relevant but they also want to track it. The tracking part is just easier...

[zeta0134]

I'm totally OK with that actually. Organic sponsorships have the very important quality of being vetted by the site in question, which greatly lowers the risk of malware being delivered in a way that the site owner can't claim responsibility over. I think tracking of these types of sponsorships would also be fairly trivial (server-side code to report back pageloads or even access to youtube's analytics for sponsored videos) and shouldn't need to involve third-party software running in the user's browser.

It's third-party javascript (and flash) that I mostly object to. If the site owners have to serve the script in question, they can inspect it for shady behavior, and make informed decisions. I believe the practice of tossing a third-party iframe in your template/css and calling it a day is the most dangerous trend on the web right now.