I actually have no problem with Ads in general. Advertising is the soul of the business or whatever, right? If you market it well, you can sell literally shit and people will buy it. Ads in magazines (remember those?) weren’t malicious. They had to be catchy, make you imagine how much better it would be if you had this car or this videogame.

My problem is with Internet Ads.

Malicious until said otherwise

Originally, internet ads were the same as any magazine ad, you saw it flashing or somewhere and you clicked on it, making go to the page about it, but as the internet grew in size and scope, this changed dramatically.

Ads aren’t used to sell you products, they are used to make you stop enjoying what you already have. I can give you tons of examples and they’ll all relate to you in some way, because you have seen it before.

Watch the ad then continue with the program you were using. Watch the ad to resume watching the video you were watching. Oh you didn’t like the ad? Here’s a full screen unskippable ad to really hammer the point home.

Now, if this was the only issue, that would be mostly fine, but ads in pages can run malicious code, that could be exploited and cause you harm. But if they don’t run anything malicious programming wise, they are still malicious, because their usage is to stop you from enjoying the content you’re enjoying, deliberately.

The (Mostly) No Ads Policy

As I said, ads can be fine when used for their purposes, which is marketing things. But I’ve adopted a ‘No Ads, Mostly’ policy with my personal things. I use Firefox and Ublock Origin on my PCs (and NoScript at my personal PCs to have even more control), my home internet has a Raspberry Pi 3-powered Pihole, my Android devices have Revancedfor Youtube ads, and can’t forget good old SponsorBlock to limit how much baked-in ads in video there will be. The last one isn’t to fight the maliciousness of ads, just to make sure the experience isn’t annoying.

I did this because I hate Internet Ads, and there will never be a moment where I’ll succumb to this dumb practice.

Both versions of Extra Activity (the old and new websites) don’t have ads. This website, Extra Topics, doesn’t have ads. The Neptunia Wiki doesn’t have ads. And I’ll be sure that if there’s any other website that I’ll create in the future, it won’t have ads.

Sorry Google, but your 1300 BRL (About ~240 USD) offer to add AdSense to my things isn’t worth my integrity. Keep your money, I don’t need it.

Conclusion

Usually I don’t post a finishing post, just a snide insinuation of something. But not this time, because I genuinely hate Internet ads. Let this post and website be archived and used against me in 5 or 10 years when someone tries to tell me I’m using ads to get richer or something. But that’s not happening, because I hate them more than anything.

If I lose my job today or tomorrow, I’d still have the means to survive and keep some stuff around and available. But never adding ads, that’s just scummy.