Ads - the bane of our lives or a valid tool?

[wraith808]

In the OpenCandy thread, a few people expressed rather vitriolic views towards ads in general, throwing Adware and Spyware around in relation to using Ads as a source of revenue at all.

I don't see ads as intrinsically bad.  They serve a purpose- they get advertisers to support the software/service/site rather than myself having to pay money.  I donate a site for use by a community, and the price gets to be a burden at times; I've thought of running a fundraiser sort of like DC, but unobtrusive ads would help offset some of the cost- of course with things like ABP, AdMuncher, etc., that lowers the use of such as an offset.  Also, if you offer freeware, then you have a burden as far as bandwidth, which perhaps things like OpenCandy would help to offset.

If something shows ads as a way to keep things free, and does not install anything to your drive, nor force exceptional increased use of bandwidth (text adds or the add of a few k to the size of the download) is it such a bad thing?

[cthorpe]

I run AdBlock Plus when I am using Firefox (95% of the time).  I have quite a few sites "whitelisted" so their ads appear.  If I find myself going to a site all the time and using their bandwidth and knowledge, then they deserve some revenue.  On the other hand, I'd rather see a site ad-free if its an "unknown" site.

I had a site that was moderately successful for a time.  At its peak, it was averaging over 1000 "unique visitors" a day.  I put up ads to defray the cost of running the site.  The rest, I promised, would go to a charity closely related to the site's content.  After running the ads for 3 months, I had to shut down the site.  One of the many reasons was that I was paying more than the ads were bringing in.  When looking through logs, I saw that most ads were being blocked, so I wasn't even getting the fractions of a cent for impressions much less any actual click-throughs.  Even my regulars were blocking the ads, which were the only source of income the site had.

As for ad supported software: as long as the ads only appear when I am using the particular software, I have no problem.  If I recall, Eudora used to have an ad-supported version of their email client that I used exclusively throughout college.  If the program installs some other kind of ad-generating software on my computer, however, it's not ok and the software goes in the trash.

C