MADNESS: I finally understand Ads

I’ve been scratching my head trying to work out why Facebook’s recent announcement about the Ad delivery is soooo important. In fact for months (years?) now I’ve been wondering what the fuss about online ads is?

After all, who ever sees any of these ads?

Turns out lots of people. Probably most people.

You see, I hardly ever see ads. I don’t know whether it is IE natively or my IE7Pro add-in killing Ads, but I have never seen an Ad in Facebook, nor for that matter on many other sites.

That is until I used FireFox to do some browsing.

Here’s Facebook as I normally see it (in IE)

But here, OMG, is the same page in FireFox, complete with big ugly ad (in Red square).

I checked a few other sites and the same result – they all have ads. Who’d have thought?

Here’s http://www.ninemsn.com/ in FireFox (the Ad is in the red square)

And here it is in IE (hmmm, what’s that blank space?)

I can’t believe it. I mean, how do people put up with all those annoying things?

Ads in Search Engine results I can fully understand. But annoying pop ups and blinking chunks on a page are madness.

Now, to be clear, this isn’t an IE versus FireFox post, as I’m sure FireFox has Ad blocker plug-ins as well.

Rather, this is just a post about someone who has ‘missed out’ on all that visual pollution, and can’t believe there is a whole industry surrounding it, let alone organizing big events to announce some ‘enhancement’ to it. Incredible.