A while back, Internet advertising was incredibly obnoxious. Sites would draw you in, and then they seemed to care more about ad impressions than their content, so you would be barraged with advertisements. Popups, popunders, flashing ads, ads covering content, ads playing sound, ads trying to install software, ads resizing windows…

Switching to Firefox prevented the egregious stuff that should never be allowed (like popup ads resizing windows and installing software), but it was still a nuisance. One day I discovered AdBlock Plus, and I basically never saw any ads again. For a really long time, life was great.

Over time, my conscience got to me. (The fact that my paycheck comes from an ad-supported site might help, too.) Whilst certainly not legally-binding, I came to see a lot of Internet sites as having a tacit agreement in place: you can access our content for free, as long as you view our ads. It’s kind of like commercials: there’s no expectation that I’ll sit glued to the television and watch every second of them, nor is it expected that I’ll do business solely with companies that advertise on TV. But commercials are the only reason I can watch TV for free, just as ads are the only reason many of the sites I enjoy are free.

So I turned off AdBlock Plus, and started viewing the web the way a lot of other people saw it. And I felt good about myself. Even if it’s only a few pennies at a time, I was helping to support the sites I frequent. Every now and then I’d find an ad that was actually interesting or relevant, and I’d click on it.

But then I had another revelation. A lot of Internet ads aren’t at all like commercials. It’s like a gang of mobsters leaping out of my televisions at commercial breaks, holding me on the couch and performing annoying charades while showing me graphic photographs of how well their male enhancement products work, all the while making an awful racket and getting in my way. And it’s like commercials that pop up in the middle of a suspense-packed action screen, completely obscuring whatever is going on. In the few years when I didn’t  view advertisements online, it seems that advertisers have had to become even more obnoxious to cope.

And for that reason, I have reenabled AdBlock Plus. I sometimes think I should allow it to display advertisements on some sites that I frequent that display only tasteful ads, but other times, noticing just how obnoxious ads are, I think it’s not worth my time.

What I feel worst about isn’t a sort of “soft theft of service,” but the fact that I may unknowingly link friends, coworkers, or blog readers to sites with popups and obnoxious ads, because I don’t ever see them. It’s a cruel world out there.