‘Rich media ads’ - a good reason to block Google AdSense
I’ve got Google AdSense on my site. I don’t really know why, since I make all of about half a cent from it every six months. Google are now planning to add “rich media” to adverts, which means interactivity, high-definition video, Flash and so on.
So, you go to read an article. Instead of getting a small subtle text advert, you get an all-singing, all-dancing interactive ad. Great. Google, having saved us from punch-the-monkey pop-ups with AdSense, has now decided to let AdSense/AdWords customers reimplement punch-the-monkey ads with AdSense/AdWords. You better grab yourself Adblock Plus and enjoy the web without Google ads.
I’ve always found it quite amusing when people say that the great thing about Web 2.0 is that it’ll enable us to choose to have exactly the sort of advertising that will interest us. I’ve already done this. The exact sort of advertising I want is “none”. No advertising. “What type of advertising do you want?” The question in my mind is synonymous with “When we next decide to irritate you for no good reason, what would you like us to say?”. Well, I’d rather you didn’t irritate me at all.
I also know that typing the previous sentence makes me a hypocrite. Oh well. I’ll remove the advertising from the site sometime. Not now: it requires me fiddling with HTML templates and re-rendering pages and stuff. Can’t be arsed.
