[JoeAltmaier]

I find it very curious indeed. In my browser on my hardware in my home, the marketing types are insisting that I MUST watch their ads or I am cheating.

This is of course a natural impulse, for them. They put a lot of effort into creating manipulative words and images, and there I go ignoring them. Must be frustrating. But to claim I'm in the wrong is a species of hubris I don't subscribe to.

When I buy the sunday newspaper, I dump the wad of ads in the trash before I leave the convenience store. Nobody jumps out of the bushes and claims I'm stealing.

In fact I make an effort to ignore ads all day long, whether its ignoring billboards, posters, spam email etc. None of that is 'stealing'.

I sympathize with folks who see their livelihood disappearing as the Internet evolves. But blamethrowing isn't going to move us forward. They'll just have to come up with something new.

[keithpeter]

Actually, I rather like a clever advertising hoarding (aka billboard). Some of the little ads you get on buses can be quite funny. These things occupy a tiny percentage of my field of view for a few seconds. They may leave a trace of positivity about the thing being advertised in a general sort of way.

The thing about intrusive adverts in Web pages is the visual noise and the tracking of behaviour across sites. The latter will probably become regulated in some way as the legislative systems respond to the properties of this new medium. The former will prove self defeating ultimately - the more strident the intrusion, the more people will use whatever settings/programs they can to avoid it. I recently actually used a command line Web browser to read the text of an article - a few hundred words - because I could not actually see the text in Firefox because of the huge file load contained in the page.

[unprepare]

Great post, i think you just missed one increasingly important aspect:

You dont have a monthly cap on how much of your surroundings you can take in; many people have caps placed on how much data they can download.

There is an actual measurable cost to advertisements over a metered data plan. It literally costs you money to even see an ad.

If it was 50 cents per MB, are you still going to enjoy that delightful little advertisement that just cost you 3 bucks to see? (obviously a hyperbolic price, but its the concept that matters here)

If you are 1MB away from your data limit and you go to some small website that loads 2MB worth of ads - are you going to be okay with paying an overage charge for viewing that advertisement?

[keithpeter]

I take your point - I have no hard and fast cap on this adsl broadband over copper connection. Reminds me in a way of the annoyance with faxed adverts we used to have decades ago - that might be a useful analogy if you are dealing with PHBs.