If there’s nothing certain, as Ol’ Ben put it, but death and taxes, Hamlet wrestled with only part of the question in his most famous soliloquy:
To be, or not to be…. For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come!
(This passage must set the record for titles derived from a single chunk of text. Off the top of my head: What Dreams May Come, with Robin Williams. The Undiscovered Country, Star Trek. To Be or Not to Be, starring Jack Benny. Perchance to Dream, a book by the late Robert B. Parker. And I’ll bet there are at least a few more.)
Anyway, so Hamlet spoke on death. He covers taxes, too:
This heavy-headed revel, east and west, makes us traduced and taxed.
But it was another tax I’ve been thinking of lately, the tax to browse content on the Internet.
Advertising.
I have no problem with advertising per se. It’s a trade I’ve been willing to accept: Pay for my content by positioning ads where I can see them. Up to now, I’ve been content with that trade.
However, in the past few months, advertisers have, I believe, failed to uphold the implicit bargain as we struck it some years ago:
- There are an increasing number of interstitial ads, ads I must wait out or dismiss before seeing the content I clicked on. I don’t like it, but I understand it.
- The on-page ads have begun increasingly to use Flash, suck up bandwidth, and delay access to and responsiveness of the page I sought.
The latter has caused me to reach a breaking point — minor as it may be — and do something I vowed a year ago I wouldn’t do.
I installed Firefox so that I could use AdBlock Plus.
I pay Comcast for significant bandwidth already. That’s okay, because that’s a fair exchange; if I don’t like their rates, I can go back to Qwest, for example. But I’m tired of advertisers raising the cost of my clicking on content without offering an alternative.
So I have installed my own alternative.
I don’t like Firefox, frankly. It’s clunky compared to both Chrome and IE, though faster than the latter. (Why the heck can’t Mozilla make Ctrl+Tab work? Is it because it’s a Microsoft idea and Not Invented Here? Please!) But AdBlock Plus seems designed for Firefox, and so I’ll trade the inconvenience of Firefox for the convenience of seeing a page before my kids graduate college.
I hate doing this. I feel like I’m breaking a bargain… but I’m not the one who broke the bargain first. If we go back to a world where advertising is lightweight, or if I have alternatives to pay for ad-free content, that’s a different deal. But to the advertisers of the world, I say: Give Me Back My Bandwidth and Responsiveness.
And so, at least for now, advertising is no longer “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.”
Whew. I’m glad I got that off my chest. Now back to our regular scheduled programming.
