Adverts: Love 'em or loathe them?

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I don't see Internet adds because I use a privacy-focused browser (Icecat), a web proxy (Privoxy), and I usually have Javascript disabled. I also don't use many of the types of websites that display lots of ads, and I'm not on any social media platforms.

I dislike web ads. There are too many, they are not useful, and I'm never in the mood to bother with them. My shopping decisions are more deliberate.

I don't see TV ads because I don't watch TV. I remember that some TV ads were amusing, but more than one or two during a show was too many interruptions.

I don't see ads online because I use an adblocker. Before I used one though they used to irritate the hell out of me, they make pages lag so much sometimes and can take up too much space.

When I had a shoulder injury, I couldn't easily reach the volume control slider for my computer speakers. I rigged up a light stick that hangs down right near the keyboard, and I still use it. There are probably ways to rig a keyboard for a reflexive, instant muting, but one way or another, being able to cut off the sound of ads makes them far more tolerable. I keep something else to look at on another screen. The remaining problem is that my attention span is getting shorter.

I got my AdBlock years ago. Moving ads are an a annoyance and a distraction, but very loud ads hurt my ears. They are a must for this Aspie.

I even get annoyed at the way Netflix starts playing a trailer of a "recommended" movie on the main page. I know they're not trying to get any more money out of me, but I hate most unsolicited sound and pictures, and movie trailers are designed to get attention (i.e. to distract me by brute force, which annoys me greatly, because I find it hard to resume after an interruption, and anyway I don't usually like the stuff they're touting, so they're wasting my time, which also annoys me greatly). Most of the annoyance is the ridiculously loud noise they make, though I don't like the pictures either. I send the TV sound to a hi-fi amplifier which gets its power via one of those remote-controlled mains switch things, so it's usually easy to keep the amp off till I've scrolled down the page (which stops the trailer). The trailer can be blocked using the AdBlock Plus "block element" feature but that only works if you're watching Netflix through a browser, and sadly the picture flickers when I use a browser, so I have to use the Netflix app.

Talking of ad blockers, I've used AdBlock Plus for years and it does the job quite nicely, but I've recently switched to uBlock Origin which I'm starting to prefer now that I've figured out how to use it. I was horrified when I first tried it because it looked very complicated and confusing, but I found I can ignore most of its bewildering stuff. I like the way it organises user-blocked elements by date of addition, and the Element Picker seems a tad more functional than AdBlock Plus' Block Element feature, though there's not a huge difference and both plugins do the job. I wouldn't want to browse the Web without one.

When is online advertising going to seriously reconsider discreet placement of ADs, and hence curb those annoying pop-up ADs? ADs can appear on the top, bottom, and sides of the display screen - hence less annoying.

Only when they are forced to. Discretion defeats the main purpose of advertising. It might be good to tax ads based on their intrusiveness, and with video, on the frequency of scene changes.

Good point - has the advertising industry quietly viewed what might best be described as the "discretion demographic(s)" as overlooked? Potential respondents might very-well be that small, yet growing (average to above-average educated) demographic - which most often refrains from those knee-jerk reactions that short-circuit discretion.

How have the months of quarantine helped develop, and shape discretionary abilities? From my own personal experiences (with AS/HFA as factors), it's become "second nature" to ignore, and omit all of the AD junk!

I am neutral regarding this site. They pay for the site, but I don't have to pay them any attention and make apoint of not doing

One strong argument for blocking ads is that since ads never cause me to buy anything (it's rather the reverse, the ads tend to put me off), they can't possibly be losing anything if I block them. They might be getting paid for shoving ads in my face, but that's like having a job annoying people and getting paid for it - simply stated, if they want money they should do something that's of benefit to people.

I saw on a documentary the other day saying that before Victorian capitalism got going, advertising was considered ungentlemanly. I agree with that view.

Is it possible that the quieter, less intrusive approaches to advertising (internet ADs, and other forms of media) might become a growing-trend?

After all, the advertising field makes it their jobs to "stand-out"..........usually with the most stimulus; hence, the quieter AD campaigns might just stand-out in...........environments of over-stimulus.

Such quieter AD campaign's tend towards the above-average educated demographics -- hence advertising's examples of selling to demographics inclined towards applying discretion.

There's a school of thought in advertising that treating consumers as if they were reasonably intelligent could pay off. I've seen a tutorial thing advising sellers not to buy lists of email addresses for unsolicited marketing - it seems some people in the trade feel it's counterproductive to indiscriminately spam people. I just hope the movement for reform grows. I've really nothing against sellers making their wares known if they do it in an honest and respectful manner. Even targeted marketing, if not for the wishful thinking that usually goes with the turf, could be made into something good. If I'm interested in buying a thing, of course I'm happy to be offered information on it.

There's even a movement out there that replaces the tracking data in URLs with garbage - the purported reason for wrecking it like that is that it's only necessary for a relatively small percentage of those tracking links to be spoiled like that for the whole tracking system to be brought down. The claim was that marketing is so corrupt that it needs to be smashed like that to force the marketers to reform the whole internet business model.

I've written a couple of small programs myself that obfuscate tracking links, but I'm never sure whether they're effective - if for example I click a link in Facebook that takes me to an external website, if I swap out the tracking for some old Facebook tracking I've found elsewhere on the Web, does Facebook still get paid? And if I replace the tracking data with random characters, does the software that reads it just discard it as gobbledegook, or does it take it all in and try to use it for analytics?

I'm pretty sure that "reasonably intelligent consumers" would spend less than half as much as companies plan on now. If we want to be treated as intelligent, rational beings, we should first outlaw private fortunes, so there's no vast prize for cheating us.

^
I'd like that, but it doesn't look like it's going to happen soon. It seems that too many people will tolerate being ripped off in a jungle society as long as they can hope to be super-rich one day. There's a myth of equal opportunity. Millions do the national lottery every week in spite of the law of averages saying they're nearly all throwing their money away. Swathes of people sweat away in the largely futile belief that they might "make the big time." The vast majority will never even get into the lower end of the middle class, but they won't tolerate that hope being taken away officially. There's also some very odd psychology going on, e.g. watching Downton Abbey or a monarch trundling about in a gilded coach makes a lot of people feel rich by proxy. Sometimes I wish there was a qualification people could take an exam for, where they could have a certificate declaring them to be "not stupid." The graduates would be eligible for permanent residence in a homeland where nobody else was allowed except perhaps under strict supervision on a limited visa.