Friday, February 01, 2008

Audio Ads - An Experiment

This site might play you an audio ad. it is supposed to be only 5 seconds long, and there will not be another one for at least 3 minutes, or as long as you stay on a given page. I am trying them out as an experiment. If they turn out to absolutely awful I'll drop them.
If you hate ads in general, use the AdBlock Plus extension for Firefox, or the IE7pro add-in for Internet Explorer.
Also, use HostsMan to block content from aa.voice2page.com through the hosts file in Windows. There are similar programs for Mac or Linux users. I use all 3 because I really don't like ads, except Google adwords, which I can tolerate. After all, I display them on this blog and I get a small cheque from them once a year or so. My exclusion list looks like this:
adservices.google.com
googlesyndication.com
pagead.googlesyndication.com
pagead2.googlesyndication.com
ssl.google-analytics.com
www.googleadservices.com
www.google-analytics.com
Everything else gets blocked.
HostsMan blocks other dodgy content apart from ads, which I appreciate too. Listeners to the Security Now podcast will also know about Flash Cookies, which are used by the audio ads service. I would appreciate comments about the ads. My review of PerfectDisk 2008 is on its way, power failures notwithstanding.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't mind a few subtle ads, I use the proceeds to pay for my hosting.
Sadly I'm not allowed sound on, so no audio ads for me (is that a good or bad thing ?).

Cheers Nick

Anonymous said...

marron's hostess. ver4's ui is more sensible than previous ver. A checkbox offers to 'export' hostess's db to HOSTS after the import finishes.

proxomitron is numero uno garbage blocker. proxo is possibly stopping your audio. also, i keep xp's audio svc off, so I don't know if any audio could play even when proxo is bypassed.