Yahoo! and Google let you opt out of ads. Remember those?
I was scratching my head in wonder at the news that Yahoo! and Google are now making it easy for their users to opt out of advertisement targeting. I can't remember the last time I've seen an ad. I installed Adblock Plus a year or so ago and haven't seen an ad since.
No, I haven't figured out how Google and others can make money in the absence of ad. For that matter, who knows how CNET will?
All I know is that ads are a thing of the past for me, on the TV and on the web. It's nice that Yahoo! and Google are kind of, sort of recognizing this. But for the crowd that will be savvy enough to know how to turn off ads (and will read the press that reports on such things), they're already using Adblock Plus.
In other words, Yahoo! and Google, thank you but no thank you. We've already taken care of our ads.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
In typical business idiocy, they will wait until the are more distrusted and fined than Microsoft before they implement opt-in instead of the arrogant opt-out.
I'd drop your class if I saw ridiculous requirments like that.
400 million people do not use hotmail. A huge chunk of the number of accounts are used to send spam and in my case, use Hotmail to sign up for crap online that will result in spam.
There is no reason to use any of these crappy free email services. You get what you pay for. I don't block all email from yahoo or hotmail since a few of my wayward students use it. What I do is whitelist them.
But when CNET and every other website has to institute subscription fees because advertisers realize that paying for ads nobody sees is a waste of money, that's going to be an even bigger inconvenience.
I have no obligation to look at or respond to ads on websites I go to or TV station I watch. It is not theft. There are simply no words to respond to the idiocy of your remarks properly.
People have been blocking ads for years.
I can honestly say I have never clicked on an ad. Not once. I am not a lemming and don't allow advertising to make my decisions either so what difference does it make?
- by RabidPopTart August 11, 2008 10:20 PM PDT
- I never messed with AdBlock and I rarely ever diable popup ads. I look at it this way: if I find a way to block it, they're going to find a new way to get ads to me.
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(21 Comments)Plus, if you avoid the unsavory sites you get less popups anyway.