- The Awl, Tuesday, September 15, 2015 11:20 AM
Beginning with the best headline we’ve seen in a long time, The Awl delves into the heated auto-ad-blocking debate. Betraying its fellow online publishers, it lays a lot of the blame for the
problem at their feet. “Display ads on websites have only grown more aggressive in the last two years, taking up ever-expanding amounts of space, bandwidth, and attention,” it writes.
Read the whole story at The Awl »
The idea that overaggressiveness has led to ad-blocking is specious. It's the unwanted ads, period. Going back to earlier levels won't put this genie back into the bottle.
Yes, Douglas, for some who hate the very idea of ads and, probably, capitalism in general, it is the ads. But this is a small minority. For some people ads are a perfectly welcome bit of entertainment and/or information; for many others, they are tolerable if not so intrusive and disjointing that they compromise the user's use of and/or enjoyment of the site's editorial content. If you check any of the ongoing studies about peoples' attitudes towards advertising as well as how they respond to specific ads you will see that your generalization vastly overstates the case against ads where most consumers are concerned.