Stardate 20021213.1449

(On Screen): The essence of advertising is rudeness. It's in the nature of the process. In normal conversation, trying to force someone to listen to something they don't want to hear is considered rude, but in most cases that's what advertising amounts to. There do exist cases where the advertising delivers a message that the customer truly wants to see, but most kinds of advertising amount to a company trying to force an unwilling audience to view a message that the vast majority of them will consider a waste of time.

And for the most part, advertising delivered to unsympathetic audiences is successful in direct proportion to its intrusiveness. The ideal case for an advertiser is a captive audience such as in a movie theater before the main feature begins.

Meanwhile, on the web the advertisers have been using more and more obnoxious approaches, with larger ads which are animated and may well flash brightly sometimes. Some ads have "on-mouseover" triggers so that if you move your mouse pointer over the ad without clicking on it then the ad will trigger some sort of multimedia presentation that you are virtually certain to not care about. Some web pages will float a big ad in front of the page  which moves around, and which can only be dismissed by finding a small "close" button in the ad itself (which means you have to look at it to figure out how to close it). And it still isn't enough for the obnoxious advertisers; they want more.

It's going to get worse. (Imagine our joy.) An industry standards body has created standards for even larger ad blocks, both horizontally and vertically. There will be even more popups and popunders, and even more floating ads.

And I've turned Javascript off. I use AdSubtract, and my default setting now for every site is to not permit Javascript. When I encounter sites which actually use JavaScript for my benefit, I enable it for them specifically. I'm fed up with having that kind of thing shoved in my face. I would rather see every commercial site on the web go broke and shut down than to put up with it. I do not subsidize rudeness. So I do not ever, under any circumstances, purchase anything from telemarketers, and I do my best to block every ad on every web site.