There are a lot of ways to block out ads these days, and while I certainly understand why one might do that, I’m not comfortable with using Adblock or similar myself. The sites I visit are free to read, and that means that usually means that advertising are their income. Today’s ad delivery software is smart enough to make sure that the advertisers won’t have to pay if the ad isn’t loaded, so users of Adblock won’t generate any ad revenue for the site. That doesn’t feel right to me, so I’m not using Adblock.
Reddit gets this, so they say thank you to users that view the ads. A nice approach I think, and also one that further builds the community.
If there is something I truly loathe when browsing the web these days, it is multiple pages. I don’t care about pop-ups, because the web browser solves that problem. I don’t care much about Flash because I can just install an extension to disable it, or just not use it at all. I don’t even care about overlays anymore, because sites using it for commercial messages in an obtrusive way just shouldn’t be visited.