Ask HN: How many of you use ad blocking on most websites?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=566130

by tokenadult • 17 years ago

6 11 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I keep seeing threads in which people refer to online ads, and I realize that I hardly ever see online ads anymore. I've been running an ad-blocking add-on for Firefox for a long time, and it seems to work pretty well at keeping ads invisible from me. I also do various forms of cookie clean-up periodically to keep my browsing behavior from being tracked by advertisers, and use multiple layers of email spam filtering.

Do you like to read advertisements on websites? Do you click through on them from time to time? What ads do you like best? What ads am I missing that I should know about?

mcav• 17 years ago

I have ClickToFlash, which almost amounts to complete ad blocking nowadays. The rest I don't mind, though I don't often see an ad worth clicking on.

tokenadult2• 17 years ago

Thanks for mentioning that specific brand name.

visdo• 17 years ago

Never use ad blocker. As an entrepreneur, you should keep your market sense(IMO, blocking ads is against it.).

RobGR2• 17 years ago

I don't think seeing ads helps your "market sense" or any other type of good sense. The ads are generally designed to make you spend money, and usually that doesn't involve making you smarter.

That would be like watching television commercials to learn how to make cars. It's not even good information on how to sell cars; most of car commercials are for cars made by companies going bankrupt, the last thing you want to do is copy them.

That doesn't mean that you might not want to monitor the ads your competitors are running and occasionally survey what else is out there; but in general, if an advertisement is spread across part of your computer screen, thebn fewer brain cells are working to make you money. Unless it is YOUR advertisement that you are working on, of course.

tokenadult2• 17 years ago

That would be like watching television commercials to learn how to make cars.

Well, it might be a little more like watching television commercials to be aware of what the typical experience of watching broadcast TV is like. A producer of television programs might do that from time to time, although perhaps not all of the time.

makecheck• 17 years ago

I use fairly sophisticated filtering to block things that are shaped like ads, to block URLs matching certain patterns, and to control JavaScript behavior.

I honestly don't mind ads if they're sane, which is probably why Google is successful (their text ads tend not to be annoying at all). I understand the need for ads, to give sites revenue for the content they produce.

The problem I have is advertisers who are so eager to push their message on me, that they have absolutely no respect at all for me. Shoving things in my face, making loud, constantly animating, colorful abominations? That gets you on my permanent ban list, and may ensure that I never, ever return to your web site.

RobGR2• 17 years ago

I aggressively block all the ads I can, with the exception of the google text ads. I might start blocking those too.

I have different browsers I use at my client's offices, on which ads are not blocked, so I see the ads then. I occasionally unblock ads specifically, if I want to see what types of ads and how many are running on a specific google search. Almost all ad-clicking I do is "market research" and does not result in me buying anything.

thorax• 17 years ago

I read advertisements from time to time. I click on them from time to time, especially on Google searches when I'm looking for a company/service that solves a particular problem. I almost never click them on any other site.

nopassrecover• 17 years ago

Heh strange seeing people like Google ads - I tend to view them as the graffiti of the web.

They are nearly always irrelevant, have a very high proportion of spam/scam associated sellers and don't have enough information or value for me to click them.

mooism2• 17 years ago

I want to block all adverts, except search engine ads, which are sometimes useful and never prevent the page from loading.

In practice, I only use AdBlock+ and FlashBlock to block ads; if I used GreaseMonkey too I could probably filter out ads in GMail and Facebook, that appear as part of the html.

I would pay my ISP to filter out adverts.

It would be interesting to find out how much sites would receive for the ads I'm not seeing, and whether I'd be prepared to pay that much not to see them.

apage43• 17 years ago

Actually AdBlock+'s element hiding rules can filter facebook ads. In fact I think a recent version has a subscription for filters that include facebook ad blocking.

Ask HN: How many of you use ad blocking on most websites?

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