AdBlock Plus is an excellent Firefox plugin that automatically prevents the display of advertising on websites. This includes banner ads, as well as the sort of targeted text ads that Google has made a fortune through. When using AdBlock, the web is a much more functional, uncluttered place with fewer distractions. I highly recommend it.
At the same time, this site does have Google ads embedded in it.
If people want to use AdBlock and, by extension, not see the ads, I encourage them to do so. Indeed, I think there is a certain editorial advantage that arises from using both AdBlock and Google ads, myself. Since the ads are blocked whenever I view my site, I do not know what is being advertised here. As a result, I am not consciously or subconsciously influenced by the advertising. If newspaper and magazine editors could live in a similar state of disregard, when it comes to who is paying the bills, perhaps there might be a bit more journalistic integrity in the world.
You haven’t moved on from Firefox to Chrome?
AsBlock is one major reason why I still prefer Firefox. NoScript is another.
I also dislike the way tabs work in Chrome.
I do often find myself using more than one browser at a time. In those cases, I use Firefox first, Safari second, and Chrome third.
For any Chrome users out there, I find AdThwart to work quite well.
Thanks Padraic, I use Chrome in tandem with Firefox but have always been irked by the lack of NoScript for Chrome. I’ll try out AdThwart.
Of course if you were in Philly and dutifily reported your ad income on your taxes you’d be slapped with a one time tax by the city of $300 (or $50/year) as a “business privilidge fee”.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2010/08/philadelphia_blogger_fee_turns.html
I do pay Canadian taxes on my ad income. Thankfully, that allows me to write off web hosting as a business expense.
I like the anthropomorphic mailbox.
Living in an ad-free internet thanks to ad blockers? That could be a thing of the past if software firm NuCaptcha has their way by making captchas into ads. ‘Instead of the traditional squiggly word that users have to decipher, the new system shows them a video advert with a short message scrolling across it. The user has to identify and retype part of the message to proceed. Companies including Electronic Arts, Wrigley and Disney have already signed up.
I figure any user who is sophisticated enough to use AdSense is someone who I want to have reading my site, not someone who I want to bother with advertising.