Internet: killing mad-ads without killing ad revenue model

Do a Google search for "you are the 999,999th visitor" and wait for the pages of complaints about the jumping, flashing adverts that cause annoyance to hundreds of millions of web users daily. In recent weeks, this ad has become one of the most displayed on what was previously the doubleclick network. Visiting the UK's Daily Mail website today, the ad appeared - moving annoyingly and distractingly - in four places on a single page - and it appeared at least once on every page we visited.

And on dozens of other websites we visited, too.

Advertising is the mainstay of the "free web." No advertising revenue and soon the web - at least for sites with credibility - will be hidden behind paywalls or subscriptions of one kind or another.

As a publisher, we have an obvious stake in this question.

And, as a provider of products and services, our associated businesses also have a stake in whether on-line advertising works.

For advertisers, if an ad is blocked by a web browser, it still shows up as having been accessed - and therefore display charges are incurred even though the viewer has not seen it. For the click-through model, an ad that is not displayed is a 100% lost revenue potential for publishers.

There are a variety of approaches: one is to set a firewall to block images of the most common sizes used by adverts: one of the simplest to use in this regard is Agnitum.

Another is to set up a browser add on that blocks access to ads chosen by size or by server.

But visitors, generally, do not mind adverts - what they mind is advertising that demands attention to the detriment of the primary reason for being on a web-site i.e. reading the content.

So adverts (or even whole websites) that play music without first checking are widely derided. But nothing comes close to the hatred for the "you have won" adverts that base their entire existence on a lie that the user is a xxxth visitor.

Fortunately, it is simple to get rid of these horrific examples of bad advertising practice with a simple add-on for Firefox.

Flashblock from http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ is a tiny bit of code added to your internet browser. It prevents the display of all FLASH based content, but maintains the integrity of the page layout and inserts a placeholder showing that the content has been blocked. To see it, simply click on the link.

At least in this way, the advertising supported model can be maintained without users becoming so annoyed that they block all adverts.

Incredibly, the xxth visitor ads have been drawing ire for more than three years. By accepting and displaying them Doubleclick - which is owned by Google and displays through the Adsense network - is harming the interests of the advertisers of products that might actually prove attractive to web users simply because many users will simply set their firewalls to block all ads based on network.

And an ad that is not displayed is an ad that can't be clicked on. And as the whole Adsense model depends on click-throughs, it's obvious that Google's own business model is put at risk by these most annoying of adverts.