Round the block

Watching/using online properties is a fascinating experience. You’re a part of the struggle between Good and Evil on a daily basis, in so many ways. You don’t really need to pay $15 for a Star Wars franchise film (except for the Imax experience), because you get it whenever you hit a landing page.

Websites are becoming increasingly obnoxious about their ads—they literally explode in the middle of content, with (my biggest annoyance) loud videos just blazing into action and the close button nearly invisible.

Then there are the pop-up “sign up for our emails!” boxes that cover up the content about 12 seconds after you land. Very often you’re given only one option to make the obstruction disappear—enter an email address. (Although I’ve discovered that, even if they don’t provide a “Nope” choice, or a close-box button, if you just click outside the damned thing, it disappears. And if it doesn’t, I always decide that the content isn’t worth my time.)

Naturally, technologists saw the universal need in these scenarios, and thus were born any number of ad blockers, some native to the browser and some that you install as extensions. And as these products did their job, web publishers and advertisers upped their game to dodge, subvert and crush them.

Ergo the eternal war of Good and Evil.

For example, links to both Fortune and Forbes frequently are intercepted by a page that offers you a thought-for-the-day or some commercial message.

And I always wonder who it is, that one person out of their daily traffic of tens of thousands, who actually thinks, “Why, yes—I believe I’ll interrupt my quest for your pithy articles to watch some crappy commercial or ponder your faux-Zen management-lite truism.”

Recently I’ve noticed that Forbes is getting pushier about visitors to their site getting a free (at least an ad-free) ride.

I’m not the only one, as witnessed by this tweet that came across my feed:

But this is not the end of the story. Last week I was tracking down some information on events that Forbes puts on and I got into an endless loop of going-nowhere as the ad-blocker blocker refused to let me into the site, no matter how many times I clicked on the “continue to site” button. (I’d click and the page would refresh on itself.)

How did I solve the problem? I fired up Internet Explorer, used their crappy UX to get to the content page, and then closed it out again as soon as I got what I wanted.

I’m sure we’re due for more sophistication in ad blocking, to be followed by bigger hammers from the advertisers. I’m making more popcorn and settling in for the next chapter. It’ll be epic.