When Flash ads play over your actual content, or float over menus, or do something else that could be considered malicious, it’s gone too far.

I miss the days of the text-based ad, those I could tolerate, and those I would click on if something interested me, but begging for my attention in the equivalent of a TV commercial irritates the hell out of me and I would never purchase anything from the advertiser who irritates me ever.

Studies on to who pays attention to what part of the page are pretentious, and themselves are only made so someone can make money to make the study itself. If something is actually worth selling, a text based add under the menu will suffice. Otherwise it’s just annoying content wasting my resources that needs to be blocked permanently. So long as an ad is visible, it can be seen. It doesn’t need to be obnoxious otherwise steps need to be taken to make sure that it is never seen ever (by anyone, we need a built-in spam database for our browsers supported by the manufacturers of such browsers, we need to bring the net back to it’s past glory where ads were bandwidth conscious and text-based!) Maybe that will never happen, but I for one won’t be putting up with increasingly annoying ads being forced upon me against my will when all I want is useful content.

These days I seem to have to watch 30 seconds of streaming video advertising something every time I click a link, or have a bunch of animated stuff slowing down the page, in a year there will probably be twelve one-minute advertisements per click for five seconds worth of actual content. Unacceptable, we need stronger protection.

I understand that some sites need the money from ads to operate, even if the owners have real jobs, but there has to be a better way than Flash, and I think if Flash based advertisements lost their prominence, text-based ads and static images would once again become valuable.

The only reason I even have Flash installed is because a lot of actual content makes use of it, but that fact seems to be getting exploited more and more to it’s fullest and it’s getting to be unacceptable.