[Goldwingnut]

The ads are an unfortunate and necessary evil because nothing in this life is free. Most do not know or understand the details and costs associated with running a popular website. Everything costs - data storage, bandwidth, support, site design & maintenance, SEO, website hosting, the list goes on and on and of course we can’t for get labor. And, someplace alone the way there is the brass ring that all are striving for, profit. Without the latter there are few incentives for putting in the many many hours of work it takes to keep an online media site running.

On a website such as this there are many ad sources - the internal ads, which are locally generated ads from local sponsors are the ones the content provider has the most control over and for many (myself included) are the primary source of revenue, there are ads that are sourced by the web hosting service that the content provider has little control over and the content provider only makes a small percentage of their gross revenues from. Perhaps the most intrusive of sources are from the search engines that place their hooks into every website and are responsible for most of the bombardment, and while annoying, the content providers recognize that these help drive traffic to their website and that traffic volume (unique users and clicks) is used as an incentive to get more sponsors and better rates from local advertisers, and eventually and hopefully allowing the site to become profitable. It’s pretty easy to tell the sources for the ads, once you get past the local business ads, the rest are driven by these external sources and the cookies left behind in your web browser’s temp folders.

Ad blockers are a great tool but they also work to the detriment of the content provider’s site counts and ad revenues. As far as one platform or anther being less susceptible to ads, I personally don’t see it. I’m working on an iPad right now and on the main page where I started typing this there were 17 different ads in view, I see similar numbers on my iPhone and desktop computers regardless of which web browser I use.

Television is little different, ad content is through the roof. Do you remember the ads on shows from when you were a kid, Gilligan’s Island normally had 3 commercial breaks, one offer the prolog, halfway through the broadcast, and then just before the epilogue, now days you see commercial every 4 to 5 minutes, sometimes more often. A 30 minute sitcom once had 22-24 minutes of content, that number is now down to less than 15 minutes (perhaps this is why TV content has degraded so much over the years - no time for story development, only enough for the cheap one liners and degrading comments - oops getting off topic!).

Advertisers are well aware of your annoyance by the ads and your efforts to defeat them, have you noticed on many shows you’ve recorded there are segments where you can’t fast forward through the ads or if you FF before the ads start that when you do stop new ads magically appear. These are all self inflicted, ad providers working in response to our habits of trying to skip over the commercials.

While this site has many sponsors, it is nowhere close to being in the league of that other local website with its completely overwhelming barrage of ads all responding to the clickbait stories that they produce. That black hole of negativity may (we can hope) someday collapse in upon itself.

Everything comes at a cost that we all must endure, the internet is not free. As the saying goes, there is no such thing as a free lunch.