[paulnelligan]

I would argue that once you dismiss ads and scroll down the page that content is entirely readable. The internet has given us an expectation that everything should be free and immediate, and we can't tolerate anything less.

In the old days you paid for a newspaper or magazine with money, now you pay for it with advertising (or you pay money to remove the advertising) - nothing new there, nothing surprising, good content is still good content, and the shit is still there in abundance also ...

[prawn]

You pay for a newspaper and it still has advertising...

[JoeAltmaier]

...but my newspaper ads are a wad of color-printed coupon sheets etc. I extract the ad-wad and drop it in the bin on the way out of the market.

Leaving me with 3 or 4 thin sheets of local news.

[prawn]

Newspapers here in Australia will have those catalogue inserts (we don't really have coupons) PLUS ads on almost every page. In fact, the amount of pages in the daily newspapers is directly decided by the ad inventory they have - fewer ads and they'll leave out content, more ads and they'll find more stories or lower the bar a bit.

[re_todd]

... and they don't reduce our multi-core cpus to a crawl.

[farslan]

One example for this is the The New Yorker iPad app. Great content, built-in subscription, but even with those they have full-page ads. Marco also mentioned about this: http://www.marco.org/2011/10/27/double-dipping-ads-in-ipad-m...

[artmageddon]

Yes, but the advertisements don't get in the way of the content - editors wouldn't allow that. Also, the only way the ads can harm you is if they're coated with cocaine or some other drug :)

[spooneybarger]

I suggest you pick up a copy of the New York Post and other NYC 'tabloid' style papers before making a blanket statement like "editors wouldn't allow that."

[artmageddon]

Fair point; I wasn't thinking of those kind of publications.

[absconditus]

Can you really think of no other ways in which ads might harm someone?

[artmageddon]

I could, yes - but I was lightly referencing the fact that opening up a newspaper and seeing an ad that I don't care for means I can move past it or ignore it, whereas with a computer it could mean having to spend time running a malware scan because the ad was hosted by a malicious provider.