Now, I don’t mind the occasional ad here and there, but I get really annoyed when I get a “video pre-roll”. A lot of times, these ads are played indiscriminately! I could be watching a 15 second clip, that I have to watch a 30 second ad to see! The worst ones are when I watch an ad, to see an ad. I’m like, “What the HELL?”
Call me weird, but I actually like seeing ads, here and there. Things might just peak your interest as you wander through the web, but I like the ability to see them at my own leisure, and not get SWAMPED with them.
A few posts back, I’ve written about how disabling javascript can pretty much put an end to most of these ads. The downside is that there are so many websites now and days that RELY on javascript. I’ve written another post about graceful degradation, and how a well-written site should have that. More and more, companies are assuming that a user MUST have javascript enabled, and are doing away with graceful degradation. Facebook for one, will lose 95% of it’s functionality if something went wrong with your javascript. Not the mention the endless horrors of javascript bugs, but that’s a story for another time.
So what do you do when you can’t turn off javascript? You ADBLOCK! Ad-block is a plugin that can be installed on Firefox and Chrome! Ad block will prevent the ad from showing up. Before, they simply stopped images, and popups, but I was never too concerned about that, but now… they even stop video pre-rolls, and that’s a feature I wouldn’t mind living with!
If the ads were less intrusive I would have never had to take such a drastic measure, but it has, and now, I’m going to watch some ad-free videos.