I’m so used to all my Firefox add-ons and Safari tweaks that when I first downloaded and tried Google’s Chrome browser I was in for a surprise. I had honestly forgotten how full of garbage the net is these days — or rather still is, since it’s more or less always been this way the last decade if not longer.

It’s in no way Chrome’s fault, which in fact is a pretty stable and good browser. But without my add-ons — like Adblock Plus, Greasemonkey and NoScript — the entire experience was so different from what I’m used to. Every page I visited was full of the most horrible flash ads, both with and without audio noise, and on sites like YouTube the comments took up more space than the video for example.

While on that subject, as I assume most people have discovered already, the comments on YouTube almost makes you lose faith in humanity if you still had any. I’m quite serious, during my Chrome test drive I watched some of the j-vlog videos I subscribe to via RSS and even the most helpful and friendly videos were full of several hundred hateful, sexist and just terrible comments.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but for some reason it did in at least a little bit. I’m so used to having comments hidden (with Greasemonkey) on sites like YouTube, and if anything this is a comment about myself. Anonymity and the mentality that leads to for example Godwin’s Law is something that shouldn’t surprise me, neither should ads do. But for some reason it did.

While writing this article I watched a clip, incidentally on YouTube, of the wonderful Stephen Fry when he was on The Graham Norton Show. Fry is a little bit better with the words than me and his thoughts on this subject sums up mine as well pretty perfectly:

I love the online world [...] but there is a downside, it literally is the downside. If you look at someone’s blog or you look at a YouTube film or something like that it’s filled with comments. People who have decided to be unutterably mean, unutterably resentful and angry and bitter and insulting and rude. That is the unwanted dead caterpillar in the otherwise lovely salad of the Internet. — Stephen Fry

Blinking lime green ads — in 2010?

Ads on the Internet are a joke to be honest, and I see no moral or otherwise problem with disabling them. Some argue that you’re robbing the website from possible revenue, but I’m not in any way going to buy stuff from ads. I’ve never clicked on a single ad since I stopped using Netscape in the mid 90’s or so. When I watch something on the TV I just skip the commercials (since I rarely watch stuff live on the TV) and when reading a magazine I don’t even glance at the ads. Sure, if I see something in the corner of my eye it will get into my subconscious and if I block the ad entirely that won’t happen — but I don’t see that as a valid point.

When I’m reading a magazine the ads are often still photos or of a minimalistic character, but on the net everything is moving, blinking, screaming or if all else fails — everything at once. This is one of the reasons I was surprised when I used Chrome, because I thought we had left most of those ads behind us. That wasn’t the case it seems like, during my rather short test drive I saw several blinking lime green “This is no joke! You’re the 457,254,567,234 visitor to this site, click here to claim your prize” or something along those lines as well as “Punch/Shoot/Hit the [something]” with some crap moving all over the screen.

I know marketing is impossible to figure out, which is why there are so many failed campaigns and oh so many laughable examples. However, when you see some of that you still go What The Fuck. It’s one thing when you are seeing these ads when you’re on an obscure website or someones blog, but when you see them on some of the largest news papers websites it’s just unbelievable. These are companies that have dealt with ads and marketing for decades if not a century.

I’m all for companies making money and selling their product, and without ads many of the websites and podcasts I view/listen to wouldn’t be available. I’m all for new methods of them trying to sell me stuff, I understand the whole capitalistic part. What I don’t understand is why we are stuck with the same concepts and ideas that were present in the 90’s. Sure, back then it was animated GIF-files and now they are using Flash, but they way they are marketing is basically unchanged. This goes more or less for all medias, as I think the commercial breaks on TVs are dying as well.

According to the Qikipedia (the QI Elves Twitter feed) “85% of the clicking on web ads is done by 8% of the people. In the past two years, the number of clicks has halved.” and “A web ad with a 0.44% click-through rate is considered a success“. This if anything goes to show just how much I think this advertisement business model needs to change, it’s outdated and not only has it a low success rate but it negatively affects the web experience for the majority of its users.

All in all I’m glad I have my add-ons, but I would be happier if I didn’t have to use them to have a decent web experience. This goes for comments as well as ads. But then again I doubt the comments bit will change, since humans have always been assholes and combined with the somewhat false sense of anonymity it goes a long way… Just wanted to vent a bit.