Rantings on advertising

Ok, this one's on all the ridiculous ways that advertising is starting to intrude on our lives. Have you noticed, for instance, that certain TV stations have started running TV shows together, and then showing more ads in the middle of the shows, instead of a few minutes' worth in the middle? This is annoying for any number of reasons:

• You tend to miss the beginning of shows, because there's almost no margin of error between different shows when you're flipping around.
• There's inevitably a huge commercial break in the middle of the show. Upwards of 5 minutes in some cases!

Now, I can appreciate the need for advertising to support TV stations and the creation of good TV shows, but it seems now that more and more of it is being forced down my throat in less and less palatable ways. It's gotten to the point where I don't like watching TV real-time any more...I'll record it, and watch it when I feel like it, without commercials!

Now, let's take another annoying instance. How many times have you gone looking around for web sites, where the advertising actually gets in the way of the content! What do I mean? Well, many pages don't use the width and height graphics tags, so each graphic must at least start loading before the text underneath it starts to show. Now, you could either 1) shut off all your graphics, or 2) Stop the page loading, but then 1) you may as well use Lynx, or 2) you risk losing real content.

Why spam up my computer and waste my bandwidth?? If you've got something which you think I might be interested, then fine, show it to me. If not, let me see that, and I'm outta there. It's almost an automatic click to the BACK button if I see the beginnings of a huge ad forming.

I guess my point is, advertising is fine and good...as long as it isn't intrusive. I think it's crossing that line. Ok, I'm done now. Thanks for listening.

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