Web advertising is a double edged sword to me. On one side, it's a neccesary evil. On the other, it's about as souless as a brick forged by the Demonic House Building Company.
There's a few different types of advertising, which we shall use in the example of a shop selling goods. This is my reasoning on how certain forms I can stand and others I specifically download a program so I can set fire to them.
The most common is your standard banner, a strip around the edge of a website with an image. Nowadays these can be generated depending on what you've googled recently. Other times they're just there to hurt you, like when 80% of the internet keeps telling you tips on how to get rid of your yellow teeth. The bastards.
I like these ones, tolerate them if you will, because it lets me look around. I can go into our Ad shop, look at everything in store and finally click on what I want. From the advertisers point of view this isn't enough.
The other popular form is the pop-up, usually a small block opened in another browser window shoving the items in your face. It's the equivalent of the shop assistant trying to flog some gaudy item to you the second you enter the store, and not relenting until you tell him to. These are the ones that browser addons like Ad-Block were invented.
There's also the interactive ads, flash-based shiny things that draw you in until the box being propped up with a stick falls on you. As a gamer, I find if someone throws a little flash game of "shoot the targets" or "beat the arsehole in some game you'd never play otherwise", I have to play them. So it always pisses me off when after I shoot the three targets it throws a popup in my face for sodding viagra. I get the point, my dick is tiny, i'm closing you anyway.
Back to our shop, this is essentially one of those people outside it with a clipboard asking you about something. It's only after twenty seconds or so you realise you're going to be giving your credit card details to this person out of pity for some starving woodlice in Germany.
When it comes to advertising, it's a general unwritten rule that your advert has to at least remotely related on what your selling. Some people like to ignore this, though, none more that the people behind Evony Online. It's pretty much a poor mans version of Civilisation online, but you wouldn't know it from the ads which spewed up EVERYWHERE.
The very first advert showed us a medieval knight, announcing how the game was "Free Forever". OK, alright ad, it actually sticks to a the-
Whoah. Number two here is quite the jump. Save the bosom Queen (for free), as if you'd normally have to pay someone in a sleazy motel to sate your Queen saving fetish.
And here's where the fun (or fun bags) begins. After this the ads, which changed roughly once or twice a week, became more and more scantily. A good deal of them were just a quick googles of "tits" by the looks of it, as a few people began complaining about them nicking their stock images.
There are the most imfamous ones. The "Play now, My Lord" of these ads became just as memorable as the enormous cleavage.
After this, they gave up caring about "setting" or "themes" or "dignity" and just ripped out images from Zoo Magazine and flooded the internet with Cheesecake. They even added an animated banner that adds a few extra frames on the tits for slow motion.
Admittedly this must of worked in a marketing sense, anyone who's ever been on the internet in the last six months has probably seen one of these.
So here's the current o-
...Wow. The fantasy background has literally been smothered by those two. "Fantasy game" is all that's needed now, we don't even want to tell you it's name. Arguably, this is because the name has been tainted to buggery thanks to it's shit campaign, and it doesn't want you to know. Similar to the Dickcheese Chocolate Company changing it's name to Kraft-Cadbury.
Now ads arn't going to go away any time soon, they're just get more and more like Las Vegas until there's giant glowing tits at the top of Wikipedia that jiggle upon the mouse touching them. One of the most popular browser addons ever is AdBlock, which will remove any trace of adverts from the website. Pop-up blockers are generally native to every web browser today, too. The people behind the websites are complaining about how their revenue is being drained by these practices. A decent argument, this has been how most websites have worked since the fat billionaires of the dot-com boom threw wads of cash at them then suddenly found out they weren't getting it back. The world of "gold membership" is becoming more prevailant, while other sites show a big-brother esque way of dealing with those who dare not look at the Evony Tits.
The Escapist. An australian web-magazine about gaming, took a stand against the peasants trying to get rid of an ad that was slowing down their computers. After a few people mentioned getting adblock to solve the problem, they were suddenly banned from the forums with no explanation. After a few hundred posts turned into a bitch-fest, one of the admins finally explained the reasoning.
Do not confess, teach, admit to, or promote ad-blocking software that will allow users to block the ads of this site.
I truely hope that everyone that reads this will consider turning off their ad-blocker for this site. If we have offended you or you don't deem this site to be worthy (and would like to have it shut down instead), do what you will, but don't pretend to be surprised if the site dies.
Hm, alright then. With how they make money today it's a plausable argument. But when your ads start slowing peoples computers down it should be up to them to fix it, not blame the users like you've shot someone and need someone to pin it on. They backed down in the end, but any talk of AdBlock on the site will get you a warning now.
I see Web Advertising in a similar vein to the terrible attempts to combat Piracy. The methods they're using to give this stuff to the user themselves are draconic, and the alternatives like AdBlock of Bittorrenting are simpler for the user, create less hassle, and are a win-win situation overall. Unless the big companies stop dicking the little man by destroying those who downloaded the current episode of LOST because it wasn't avalaible in their country, trying to make a point with idiotic fines as if we're all suddenly going to listen and crawl back into our caves, or believing giant flashing blocks on our screen telling us we've won an iPod is "tolerable", these companies will fail. They'll blame it on the users, but it's them being shit that will be the downfall of all things pretty looking.
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