Do You Opt-Out From Ads?

@willfe (149)
United States
April 16, 2007 2:40pm CST
On an advertising revenue-supported site like myLot, I'm nervous about even posting this, but I'm doing so anyway :) With the BBC reporting that an upcoming release of the Flash-based video player used on popular sites like YouTube and even Google Video includes a feature to permit the sites to force viewers to watch an advertisement before playing the desired content, the scourge of invasive, infesting advertisement rears its ugly head yet again (read http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6558979.stm for details). We're inundated with nearly ten thousand advertisements *per day* on average -- over a third of broadcasts over the air in the United States alone is advertisements. Switching off the TV takes care of television-based advertisements, and TiVo helps watch TV without being bombarded with as many ads (though the industry is doing its best to kill or hobble TiVo these days). Ad blockers in Firefox do a great job of stemming the tide of online ads, and spam filters help (a little) in nuking junk mail. Being consciously aware of advertisements is the only way to stand even a chance of preventing them having an effect on us, but it also kinda sucks having to pay enough attention to the ads to realize they're ads so we can teach ourselves to ignore them. Heh. What sorts of things do you use to try to stem the tide, to cut through the noise to find the useful content?
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