Unblock Me, Please?

by   •   Five Minutes in My Head
 
This post is over 17 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

You see them everywhere. Banners advertising products and services can be found on just about every website, sometimes on every page. I have my own collection of banner advertisements on my own website, and a leaderboard sized advertisement on the bottom of every page on my blog. But being an internet user and lover myself, I know how annoying advertisements can get, so I try to make my advertising placement and formatting as fitting and subtle as possible. Take the advertisement on this page, for example. It’s located all the way at the bottom, out of the way of the main content. It even fits the color scheme of the page, so it seems like it belongs naturally on this page.

Unfortunately, I’m not the owner of every website. Some webmasters choose to place destructive advertisements on their pages that may pop up, pop under, play sounds, or flash like crazy and give you seizures. Some webmasters even give chunks of their website to advertisers in the form of an IFRAME, so advertisers can do whatever they wish to do with that space. Their selfishness to do nothing but promote their business has caused an overall bad image for advertisements in general, internet-wide.

Here’s a reward for you for reading this far into my blog post for today: a solution to annoying advertisements. Mozilla Firefox offers an add-on called AdBlock Plus that removes page elements that match any entry in a list of thousands of well-known advertisements. Even better, you can custom-define your own advertisements to get rid of ones that were not originally on the list.

Now that you have eliminated probably the most annoying aspect of the internet, you caused a different problem, this time for webmasters like me. I get paid for displaying advertisements and getting clicks or impressions. That’s right, even for impressions – I get credited for merely showing you the advertisement, without you having to click on anything, in some cases. So essentially, by showing you how to remove advertisements from your browser, I indirectly lowered potential income I could make from advertising. But, because I’m such a nice person and taught you something new, I think you should use the exceptions for AdBlock Plus and add my websites as approved sites.

Unblock me, please? :D

 

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