Blocking Video Ads

While spam is a pretty clear case of theft of service, website owners who want to run ads are almost always ethically in the clear. Assuming they're not associated with fraud or distribution of spyware - monetizing site content by including ads would seem entirely above-board. In fact, many sites wouldn't exist without the advertising that funds them.

Pop-up ads used to be commonplace, but the user experience was so atrocious that a flock of third-party apps were quickly developed to eliminate them. For various reasons, coding a tool to stop pop-ups is much easier to do than creating an Outlook antispam add-on is. In short order pop-up blocking was added to all major web browsers.

Webmasters went back to banner ads, and began running text-based contextual advertising such as that provided by Google.

Unfortunately, another class of website advertising is starting to produce some serious pain for users. About one-third of all sites I visit now feature video ads. The video starts playing as soon as I hit the site, but the sound is off unless I click the advertisement.

Like many experienced web surfers, I tend to open several tabs in my browser at once. When I do so, I may unintentionally launch a half-dozen streaming videos. Each of these chews up bandwidth and CPU time - slowing down my entire computer.

Worse, I sometimes access my home system remotely. Video can completely kill a remote desktop connection. So, while I fully support the right of webmasters to run whatever advertising they want, I really wish they'd cut back on the video.

To help combat the problem, I've installed the Adblock Plus FireFox extension. As you can guess from the name, it eliminates advertising from websites. I don't like tinkering too much with my web browsing experience, but so far it's doing a good job of removing the offending advertising without messing other stuff up.

I have some sympathy for webmasters who take issue with such ad blocking tools. At least one site is blocking FireFox completely. Many webmasters truly provide a public service, and are simply looking to cover their expenses while doing so. Maybe future revisions of Adblock Plus will give the option to only block bandwidth hogging flash-based or video ads.

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