Ads have ruined everything!!!!
Its ridiculous how many there are!!!! (Especially from US companies)
This is a complicated discussion, and I tend to agree with you, but then again with many sites
someone has to pay for the site, and in an Internet world in which many have come to expect something (or even
a lot) for nothing, advertisers are the ones who pay. And when advertisers pay, they of course want something for their money. They want clicks; they want attention; they want return on investment. As Web users started becoming more ad-blind, the ads started becoming more intrusive, to the point where, now, it's not uncommon to have to deal with not just one but two huge, content-obscuring, full-screen ads that contain
timers through which you must wait before you see the content you came to see. And then it so often happens that the content
you thought you wanted to see is in fact rubbish, essentially erected in order to feed you ads.
People get angry at this situation, and that anger gets transferred to the owners of all sites that run ads, obtrusive or not. The situation has turned ugly for everyone, I think.
I believe the Internet started as an information-sharing medium among academics. It has turned into something far less noble--and arguably far less useful. Because of ads and the proliferation of sites that pretend to offer content but actually just want your clicks, I see the Internet as
less useful today than it was, say, 5 or 10 years ago. If it continue down the current path it's on, I can imagine that it will be even less useful, or perhaps
less tolerable is the term, 5 years from now. Perhaps you will have to pay for everything when you don't want to see ads.
Personally, I'm very happy to be running an ad-free site for pretty much the same reason that I imagine the original creators of Internet content offered their wares: to disseminate information and create a community of like-minded people. Ironically, I believe the ad-free sites will start to look better and better as they become rarer and rarer.
As always, however, I may be wrong.
(And I still think that a search engine that filtered out sites that contain ads--to whatever degree the user wanted--would be a great service, if not a great business model. I wish someone would do it.)