Im sorry but as long as adds flash obnoxious colors, promote irrelevant products, make annoying sounds, attempt to hijack my browser and try to install stuff on my computer I will not deal with them. You want business from me, CLEAN UP YOUR ADDS *And yes the last two i listed used to happen to me when coming here which is why i will not allow them to be shown

Some people sure do have an inflated sense of entitlement...

Well, it is a pretty good article and puts its point across well. The point being that sites depend on indirect revenue. But it is rather one-sided. It assumes that all the cost (both for running the site and the negative cost equivalent of ads not being viewed) lies with the site, and that all the ad-blocking visitors are foregoing is the minor inconvenience of viewing the ad. And that isn't true.

I pay for the bandwidth used to download those ads to my computer, the machine to run them on, the screen to view them on. That's in good hard cash.

I pay in time lost for fixing things when an ad infects my machine or those of my family and friends, I pay in embarrassment when a noisy ad blares out when I am talking to a client on the phone. I pay in slowness, delay and inactivity when everything slows down because of one ad that can't be got rid of.

It isn't one-sided. There are costs both sides.

Now, there are several ways of handling this:

One is to not visit the site. That's not good because sites are not only interested in ad revenue, they are also interested in subscriber numbers, visitor numbers, page hits and so on and so on. They may not be directly revenue-earning but they are indirectly an indicator of the potential value of the business. So going away altogether is not good for the site either.

One is to complain to the site about their ad policy and what they accept. That can theoretically work, but it is damned hard to do. Most places it isn't easy to complain to start with, and if you do and want to be taken seriously you have to be very persistent - and even then frequently nothing is done.

One is to block ads entirely. That, I think, unless you are light on bandwidth, si probably a step too far in the wrong direction.

The last, and the one I use, is to have a policy on adblocking. Here's what I do:

1) default position is not to block ads but to block all third party cookies. That clears out most of the really dodgy stuff

2) any site that carries ads that infect a machine gets adblocked permanently. It's their own fault and not mine. Using the restaurant analogy it is like using ingredients that poison your customers.

3) Merely annoying sites get blocked when they upset me for some reason - usually to do with inappropriate ad content or content that messes with work - noise, popups, things without close buttons, things that move to fast for me to follow the close button, anything that affects open files and tabs other than the one it came from. These guys get another chance every now and then when I feel like it.

I think that's fair and reasonable.

I don't think it is fair and reasonable for a site to on the one hand boast about my visit by adding a fraction to its total views and then complain it is my fault they are not earning enough money. You can claim one or the other but not both. It's like a football stadium inviting all the local kids in for free so they can boast they had a full house and then complaining afterwards that the kids didn't pay.

This post is unbalanced as well, of course. It is meant to counterbalance the article.

By the way, at the moment I don't block here, but I do block at Arstechnica, because they carried an ad that fouled me up royally a few months back and I haven't got around to unblocking them yet.

it is right to be able to do so just as much as its my right to take the freebiee weekly paper and not once look at an add, maybe through ripping the pages out.

or perhaps you could ask for donations, its a site i would donate to to cut back on ads. but you dont ask for that, you force adverts on to us. some of them carrying malevloent code costing us time and money to fix the issue, and costing you money by our work arounds.

to put it this way it would be much like be buying the weekly paper and  turning the page only to have a syringe stab me in the hand and give me flu.

also i take this converstion to mean you dont like DVRs and you watch all the ads before movies?

I can say i buy all my movies music and games and id be happy to buy from you. but i do not sit through the ads before movies unless i want to, and i will dvr tv shows and skip the ads

if you really want to make the ads mandatory: write a redirect php script and acces the ad urls through a database.. no adblocker can block that cause they would have to block the entire site..

Aslong as any new ads that are implmented don't crash my internet then i'll be fine. Untill then ad blocker will continue to allow me to view this site for more than 10 mins.

It might just be IE but even still i shouldn't have to change browser to avoid constant crashing.

Unfortnately, I have to agree with this post.  Just last week I got infected with malware from visiting this site.  I've had it happen two other times as well.  I don't have an ad-blocker, but it's very tough for me to justify continuing to come to this site sometimes, as the ads are just out of control. 

I don't want to sound negative, or difficult, but if there was ever something you could do to change ad-companies or clean up the content, it would be much appreciated by a large number of the site-visitors.

I pay for the internet to view websites, I don't need to "pay", as per your view about ads, for sites.  When the internet first started there were no ads.  But everything has to make money somehow so ads were created.  And ads became annoying so something was created to stop ads.  It is my very right on what I want to see or not see on a website, just like if you decided to block content to people who utilized ad blocking, that'd be your right.  I think you should really count your blessings and deal with the percentage of people that block ads.  Blocking ads is no different than turing off the radio during commercials, since radio is free, but is paid for via ads.

Paid membership would work for me so long as we can get a few more priveledges as well as a yellow name because vanity is the name of the game and if I support the site I want people to know that I have that level of investment into the wellbeing of the site.

The only ads that bother me are the ones that have the fucking annoying as shit audio, visual ones I have no problem with. Although the Evony ads can be borderline NSFW.