The joy of squashing pop-up ads

If you’re reading this in the good old-fashioned newspaper, you do so safe in the knowledge that no advert is going to suddenly burst from these words and bounce around in front of you like a giddy toddler.

There’s no actor in the corner of the page repeatedly pointing at the next page, suggesting you turn it to see their ad.

There’s no chance that you’ll open the sports supplement and, simply by holding the wrong part of the page, find yourself stuck in a mobile-phone shop.

I will not stop midsentence to suggest that you check out any sponsored content. I have no sponsored content. You paid for the paper. The paper pays me. I’m the only thing sponsored here.

Instead, if you don’t mind having advertising dotted about, you’ll find ads throughout the newspaper. Some will even look quite attractive. You can ignore them if you wish. You may subliminally absorb them.

You might even read a few of them and end up booking a golf and spa weekend for two in Co Clare despite having no interest in golf and an allergy to bubbled water. Such is the power of advertising.

Of course, as we well know, a newspaper is not the internet. Print's simplicity has gone againist it for many reasons, but its corralling of advertising remains a plus.

For media companies the leap from print to online advertising is so great that many have fallen to their deaths. But, to the ordinary person out there, browsing the web has become a never-ending game of Frogger, in which you are the hero trying to dodge being hit by a pop-up advert.

“Do you want meet singles in your area?”

“Sign-up now for a free €50 bet.”

“Here’s the skin secret those expensive dermatologists don’t want you to know.”

The assault is relentless, exhausting. So many can't be bothered with it any more that it has made AdBlock the most popular extension on the Chrome browser, and a report this week suggested that such software is so damaging to the online-advertising model that it's doing what Napster did when it so undercut the music industry.

I read that last bit of information on the Guardian's website while the AdBlock symbol in the top-right corner of my Chrome browser told me that I was blocking eight ads on its page.

I have used AdBlock for a while, having become tired of playing Whac-A-Mole with invasive ads. On the whole, it works.

There are still quite a few of those Outbrain-type grids recommending other content, which seems largely about 10 celebrity sweat patches, or an old bearded guy with a musclebound body, or a Gmail trick that apparently will change my life forever.

But it wipes many sites so clean of ads that it even leaves large white rectangles where you know something should be. It wouldn’t work so well in print, where it would be like asking somebody to cut holes in a newspaper before you picked it up. But online they are quite soothing, a calm in the storm.

There are other blocking tools, working to various degrees, and AdBlock itself is behind an initiative that gives a pass to advertising considered pleasing enough that it doesn’t make your eyeballs want to jump from their sockets. It then negotiates a fee with the site owners before letting it through.

That sounds like a protection racket, but then again I really don’t want to meet interesting singles in my area, so I’m prepared to let them do whatever it takes.

None of which is good for the advertising industry or websites that rely on advertising – and that remains the model for most newspapers, certainly in Ireland.

As a journalist it is worrying when the only reliable revenue stream is so easily hobbled. But as a internet user it is a relief to be able to sidestep advertising at any moment, given how blighted each day is.

There are the radio competitions "to celebrate the launch" of something or other. The product placement on TV. The "promoted" tweets. The boosted Facebook posts. It's a shakedown, day in, day out, and nowhere more so than online.

We’ve heard some discussions about the ethics of blocking advertising. But maybe there should be greater discussion about why, after a couple of decades, the advertising industry still feels that a fine way to woo consumers is to whack us over the head with a club and drag us into their cave.

shegarty@irishtimes.com
@shanehegarty