Fun with Firefox.

[Fragbait]

I disagree.

The only ads that one should ever block are Flash ones that come layering in over your screen, or big popup windows smashed in your face. There is absolutely no excuse for this kind of advertising.

Regular ads, however, are what keeps many websites running. Just like TV stations and magazines, advertising is what generates revenue to keep the cost down. Blocking ads on a large scale will lead to the Internet ad market breaking down even further than the way it already did in 2001 or so. The only outcome is that less and less stuff will be available for free. There's a good number of programs out there that rely on advertising to be used for free as well, for example.

Not to mention that those intrusive ads I mentioned above are the direct effect of people using ad blockers. The more you try to block them, the worse they will become in an attempt to circumvent your blocking them.

As said, stuff that actually intrudes upon browsing around is fair game, but blocking regular advertising is only shooting yourself in the foot in the long run.
[right][snapback]63302[/snapback][/right]

I disagree completely. The internet user should have the right to block everything he doesn't want to watch. This of course strictly includes advertisement. Naturally there's always the more annoying ad than normal, but that differs from person to person, based on personal opinions. For example: a player of pc games might fully accept an ad for a game of the resident evil series, while a mother of young children might want to block it at all costs.

In my opinion, very rarely is there a case out there when ads are justified. Many websites only exist to serve as carrier of advertisement. In fact they may be of greater numbers than the legit web pages out there, often manipulating google search and then showing only crap. I endorse blocking everything that annoys one. If a website can't manage to keep its costs down without excessive advertising, this is more due to failed managing than due to not advertising on it.

I don't think that much useful free content is lost if most ads are blocked by the users. And even if some things are lost, I don't care about many of them. Who needs yet another animated gif gallery or this and that mp3 search engine? Crap.
Programs that rely on advertising to be free (generally known as adware) I can't support neither. In many cases you don't know the horse you bought with these programs, either they advertise something you really don't want to see, show very aggressive advertising habits or bring malware on your pc. If that is some of the stuff that won't be available anymore, I really only endorse that development.

Your last point that such intrusive ads are a direct consequence of people adblocking ads is a sheer falsehood. Such aggressive ads were there way before ad-block, and will persist whether there is some method of blocking them or not. Today, way less than 10% of all internet users do not use Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which doesn't support ad-blocking as far as I know. In fact, the average internet user knows next to nothing of how to block or avoid these ads, they are just annoying, and costing the user time and money, plain and simple.

Besides, if you are referring to ad-block, I don't understand why you mention 'big pop-ups' as annoying, since Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox have built in popup-blockers, and there are others out there. As a matter of fact, I interpret every unwanted ad as 'stuff that actually intrudes upon browsing around', since it takes time to load up, and not everybody on this planet has a broadband connection yet.

Nevertheless interesting to read a completely different opinion.

Greetings, Fragbait