A rant on Advertisements

5 Apr 2015

I initially wanted to post this as a series of tweets, but decided against it since it would be difficult to compact everything enough. Besides, this way I have an easy collection of points I can link in case a discussion comes up.

Now, this post is written by a person who absolutely despises ads and the whole idea behind it. Though not the content or creators that are supported by it. In my opinion ads should ideally be a way for you to discover interesting related content put into place because two awesome people thought it would be good to share their thing with each other's userbase.

But sadly they're not. Most of the time their whole intention is to get your attention and interest you in something that you probably wouldn't've wanted otherwise. Sometimes by straight up lying to you or just leaving out the not-so-great bits.

And that's not all. Many, if not most ads embedded into sites are collecting data. It's often said this is only used to show you more relevant ads (which does benefit both sides I suppose) and to find out how many people who've viewed an ad actually ended up buying / using the advertised product. But the potential for tracking and creating profiles of your surfing habits is there.

While I don't want to convince you of anything - other than taking an afternoon to write this up I've not done anything else like research -- which in hindsight I probably should've done - I would love to get you to think about this, and maybe accept (not adopt) a different viewpoint.

So, with all that out of the way, is it really that bad to use an ad-blocker? If you're genuinely interested in supporting content creators in other ways? Or even if you just hate ads?

As always, let me know what you think. Join me next time when I talk about why I like piracy!