bad ads

I was just thinking about obnoxious web ads when I stumbled on this post at Outside the Beltway.  If anyone wants to combat these annoying ads there are a number of Firefox plug-ins that can assist you, like this one or this one which replaces advertisements with art. 

My personal pet peeve are the damn double-underlined ad links (like this one: The Wall Street Journal).  Positioning links within a post is at once a means to network between blogs, spread information, give credit where credit is due, or even make jokes or create double meanings.  There’s a lot you can do with links, and there’s something of an art to doing it well.  When you start crowding out your posts with little faux-links that are nothing more than links to possibly related products, you make me want to not click on any of your links.  In fact, you make me not want to come back to your site.  There’s something disingenous about it.

On the flip side I’m not bothered by banners or sidebar ads in the least.  If you need revenue this seems like the right way to do it.  I really, really hate redirects though – where an ad page materializes like some over-caffeinated pop-up over the page you’re trying to open.  That says to me – “this website is less important to us than this ad is – don’t bother coming back.”  And I tend not to.