Follow Up; Why Ad Blocking is Not Evil
First was CNet and their little article about how they hated those with ad blockers and custom CSS to remove the ads, claiming it as stealing website profits. Well surprise, anyone figured out that it's CNet who were putting intrusive, annoying advertisements on sites such as Gamefaqs and Gamespot, causing many angered members and custom styles which removed ads to come out? That small attack on the neutrality of the author aside, I am now going to say the other side of the coin, why advertisements are bad and why people can and will block them.
Firstly, ads are always optional. You don't have to do anything when you see an ad, you have no obligation to click or follow through with the offers. And more importantly, you have always been able to opt out or ignore the ads. You can go to the main menu when the TV ads show. You can leave the room at that time. You can fast forward them generally, especially if you taped the program. And it's perfectly legal to block ads online, otherwise there would not be fully legal programs allowing it.
Secondly, you will not lose money if you allow others to block the ads (even though it's impossible to disallow it), simply because most who block advertisements are neither the majority, nor those generally interested in the advertisements. I use ad blocking, and I have NEVER, in my life clicked an advertisement. Even without the blocking technology, I just totally ignored them. Of course, there was exception when some jerk (hint, virus infected ads) redirected the browser, but then I just closed the window. Such people will never equal you revenue through that way. Heck, I never pay for anything online except forum software and hosting, so why would I use ads?
For another thing, it's impossible to accurately detect who is not viewing advertisements. Javascript can be disabled or blocked with a huge variety of add ons, some of which allow you to remove elements of the page or directly change HTML in your view of the page. Active X and the like depends on them using Internet Explorer with really, really poor security settings. Finally, with most forms, like CSS, it still loads the ads. Just then removes or does not display them. You cannot tell, making any real rules about this as worthless as the page they're written on for the most extent.
Also, do you know why most people that block advertisements do so? Because of two legitimate reasons. The first is those that pay for their bandwidth/downloads, and don't want huge flash files, GIFs or pointless pages downloaded from an ad server and taking it away. It saves them money basically.
Secondly, maybe many just hate how overdone and cruddy existing ads often are? Pop ups and pop unders drive people insane, hence the blockers in most existing browsers. Overlay ads keep them from using the page until it's closed, ruining usability and wasting time. Transition page advertisements are a waste of time as they just stick up random, useless pages before the person reaches the content they care about. Some flash ads stop page links working until a tiny cross is used to close the ad. And some, like the free i-Pod or 'shoot the [whatever]' games are plain annoying.
Did I forget the uses of advertisements to install spyware and adware against the choice of users? Like how software such as Winfixer and System Doctor or Zango act? I hate these enough already, seeing as they require me to terminate the browser process before the computer gets killed.
So how about then you help the users a bit more instead? Put less advertisements on a page, one or two is enough. Don't use gimmicky crap like transition ads, pop ups or flash based advertisements. And finally, make sure spyware/adware makers cannot advertise on your site. Then we might not need to block the advertisements so much.
How to Block Advertisements:
If you are like me, and hate those useless advertisements on many pages, the below list will tell you some relatively useful extensions and other stuff which may help you avoid the advertisements.
This is a great tool which allows you to block advertisements in Mozilla Firefox. If you want my list of blocked sites, ask me.
Supposedly blocks images by size. Which I can see being extremely useful in cases of morons not optimising images.
Google Results for Ad Blocking
Many useful results, including a list of hostnames to block
How to block Gamefaqs/Gamespot ads and branding via CSS in most browsers