Hit the Internet Ad Designer and Win a Free IPod!

A few months back, I commented how when it first started, cable television was largely an ad-free zone.

To some extent, the same is true for websites on the Internet. I seem to recall the most annoying type of advertisement was the "watermark," which was largely used on sites like Geocities. Basically what happened was if you visited a website there, you'd see "Geocities" on the bottom part of the screen, and it would follow you as you scrolled up and down. That's pretty tame by today's standards.

Nowadays, it seems like you can't visit a website without getting some form of advertisement. It started simply with the popup ads. That was put down by popup blockers and certain web browsers. But then the popup ads changed, and some manage to get past popup blockers (Due to the coding used for ads like this sometimes they're referred to as "pop-unders"). Now there's different types of ads based on the different programming languages online.

The worst kind play on the gullibility of the public. They'll go and boldly tell you, "hey, we found problems with your computer! Want us to scan it?" Click yes, and congratulations, you've got spyware. Other ads proclaim that if you play a simple Flash-based game you can win items like IPods (if you fall under certain restrictions, I'm sure).

It's gotten to the point that now not all browsers or ad blockers are infallible. Advertising will leak through. You've got to have firewalls, virus protection, popup blockers, and even plugins for your favorite browser just to offer some measure of relief. And if you turn off certain features of your browser to stop the ads, you may miss out on website content that legitimately uses the programming languages.

What really irritates me is that there are people out there that are paid to come up with these eyesores. Its like, "hey, we'll pay you good money to go and compromise a person's computer security so we can hock our wares." What is up there on irritability level is the websites that actually use ads like that. Granted, I know running a website costs money, but come on, the goal is to keep people coming back to the website, not drive them away. Some websites will even charge you money so that you can access the website "ad-free!" Good grief!

Sadly, ads like this are a fact of life now. It's just that I hate this mindset from people. It's the same principle as going to the movies and seeing TV commercials ahead of the movies. If I wanted to see those I'd stay at home!

Enough with the ads. Beam the product placements directly to our brains in our sleep, ala Futurama, and be done with it!