Has the Golden Era of Adblockers Passed?

Recently I tried to watch some online video on a television channel's website. The video applet failed to load completely and it didn't take long for me to develop the correct suspicion. I disabled my adblocker and reloaded the page. No fucking video. So I open the page in a vanilla browser and it loads, a wild contrast from what I had, up till that point, been used to. On the vanilla browser there is a banner and large square add. Then the video starts and I am subjected to extra-loud advertising, TV style, with a vengeance. In addition to the other adds. Another advertisement plays, and a third, before my content is loaded.

Adblockers, with the advent of hijacked banner ads and unscrupulous marketing, to say nothing of the paranoid or political users of the internet, are not simply a tool entitled users employ to rid themselves of annoyances. Ad-blockers are legitimately a way of keeping your computer clean, of preventing your oft-used technological distractions from compromise. The fact you don't have to watch commercials (which are basically always: manipulative, insulting, indoctrinating or some shameful combination of all three) is an added bonus to not having your internet-accessing-device fucked with.

I am not a poweruser but I've been adblocking for years - since I discovered it was possible. I understand that advertising revenue drives some smaller sites, and, yes, I'd agree they deserve their due - assuming they police their advertisements for some level of quality. Fine, whatever, have your .005 cents per impression. You deserve it, plucky little website. However, the worst offenders are often large media sites – sometimes even those which already use paywalls. Let me present a brief overview of the galloping trend of online advertising.

In the early 90's during the second wave of the internet, when things became graphical enough that advertisement in the classic sense became possible, it was largely internet entities that advertised for themselves, and certain forward looking companies often related to the tech-sector. It was a simpler time. By late 1999 basically everyone who wasn't under a rock or a dinosaur was getting into online advertisement. 'Hey, check out our website at http://www.geocities.SonnysPizza/index.htm for some coupons' and other types of hilarity abounded. Whatever, wherever you got advertised to, it took a slice of your pitiful bandwidth and generally wasted time and resources, but you had to face it. Eventually MSN Messenger (R.I.P) becomes huge, and eventually it begins to advertise to you.

Side banner; top banner; .gif flames - all of these things were familiar. Between then and now the internet has grown up and come of age to the point where a huge section of people use it. All the troglodytes, termites, attractive well-adjusted people, and infants came out of the woodwork and the internet is full of everyone now. Whatever, other people will tell you about it, and some gigantic nerd could probably make a convincingly venomous deal about it... all I'll say is it drove a wave of advertising intensity that eventually rivaled the notorious realm of television adverts.

Fucking pop-ups were one thing, but there came layers of advertising that would jump into existence around key-words. Video sidebars that glitched out your browser and had to fling their audio payloads into your ears. 'Interactive' commercials made by committees of dullards and shills. YouTube videos became clogged with side, top, and skippable pre-video advertisements for every user account considered important enough to waste your time for their profit. What was once dumb, became even dumber, amen. So it goes, right? Absolutely. Yet there were additions to your browsers that would kill all advertising.

True to form, adblockers were free. They worked, and nobody who adopted them ever looked back. Surfing without them was like going back in time. It sucked, you were exposed to all the reprehensible shit that barely existed in your ideal internet experience. Going back to ads is like hitting yourself in the face with a shoe. Beautiful adblocking programs, released by benevolent and right-minded developers, worked on classic print ads, video ads, and even ads played in video content. It is like a magic balm that drives mosquitoes far, far away. For those who use adblockers, the internet just is that much less shitty. It's less claustrophobic and it can seem like the terminal cash-in state of the world has been opposed.

So of course, it comes to an end, by hosted content ('hosting ain't free, yo') which a profitable broadcaster puts online. Until very recently I had never been blocked for anything but geographical reasons (though nationalization of the internet is another ugly recent phenomenon) but a week or two ago I was denied a show I had been following online. I imagine in a year it will be impossible to skip video-advertisements everywhere, and only the smug power users will know what to do about it. Hopefully the same people who did the good work of blocking online advertising will keep up and their programs will not lapse into irrelevance due to some frightening and monstrous online advertising epidemic.

Because what the hell? You're running a profitable business already, and why not add some more revenue? Why not even more? Why not three advertisements every five-and-a-half minutes on video content? Why not have it be 30% louder than actual content, like on TV? Who cares is the commercial is ideologically loaded or bankrupt of all value? Who cares if it's annoying? 'I like money, gentlemen, and nobody gets a free lunch!'

A browser without an adblocker is a sign of a pitiable person trapped in the commercial arena, a hopeless square, a submissive lackadaisical fuck, a worthless shit hyperbole rapist. This is one fight the internet should not lose.

Hey MSN! Stop trying to compete with TMZ!

I know it's way stupid to always write about how stupid the internet is and how useless news is getting what with its stupid obsession with the rich, overexposed, and useless. Most of the time I visit real news sites intentionally and I read geo/envrio/legal/political/economic news with a smattering of art and culture stuff. I should be following all these things with beady eyes, but I can interpolate exactly how the world is doing during the three-month intervals where I burn out entirely on the idea of news. At times like this I pick up a little news from word-of-mouth or whatever I manage to scan on the internet.

So I check one of my many email accounts and there's that log-out page where MSN proves everyone right for ignoring it by pandering to whatever crowd who surf casually enough that they'll spend a half-hour reading about vapid 'news' stories and greasy gossip. Yeah, the species is in decline. But that's how the majority of human history is, so I'm not trying to be sensationalistic by saying that we're on a bit of a downward spiral. I mean globally, too. You can shit out your mouth about the West all day, but it's not the only place that's fucked, you dim-witted provincialist. But the West definitely deserves your vituperation.

Exhibit A:

 = unimportant
= trivial
= obvious, self-evident
= YouTube video


This is consumer news. These stories are all headline news. So, you know what? Fuck MSN. They obviously do not care: they've given up the fight entirely. They don't want to be relevant, competitive, or innovative. They could replace this tiny headline section with a Twitter feed and it'd be more interesting and newsworthy. Those dumb fucks.

In fact, they're mocking the very notion of headlines, which makes me angrier at them – they're trampling the newspaper when it's down with belittling meta-commentary like this. Let me consider how each of those four worthless stories may enrich a person's life:

"Will and Kate stun at lavish gala" : Obviously someone gave them a taser and then it was time for some plutocrat-on-plutocrat violence. People who read this story are likely to learn about things they will never properly experience. Fantasy escapism with a twist of a high-class sneer: "You really care about us, little people? Here, feed your imagination on our table scraps..."

"Miami Beach mayhem caught on video" : My original assessment was wrong. This will be the article that ends up being a link to YouTube and a small summary paragraph. The biggest part of the story is that someone was paid for the video and that someone was paid to write the article. Now I understand why the Huffington Post doesn't pay shit to her bloggers.

"Kid makes absolutely no sense" : This is impossible to anticipate. I'm not going back to see what the hell, but it's probably another stupid YouTube video. MSN makes absolutely no sense: if someone got paid for this shit work then all of America deserves its recession. Sorry, misery. You pieces of lazy fat shit should start farming in your spare time before Cargill takes over every last link in the food chain. The world used to love you.

"Incredibly Realistic Street Illusion" : Good to see MSN exporting work to Russian cyber-crime syndicates. Yes, I want to click that link, see a piece of shit of a video, and get a rootkit installed. Thanks MSN. You are exactly what you are, and if  Bill Gates had any way of looking down the hierarchy at this shit you're pulling, he'd give you a goddamn kick so hard. Or is this merely his way of taking away with the other hand?