From the Techdirt blog:
We get it. Many of you really hate online advertising. And, indeed, there’s often a good reason for that. The ads can be irrelevant, intrusive and annoying. And, in some cases, they can even be dangerous, as scammers or those with malicious intent slip bad code into ad networks in order to wreak havoc on visitors’ computers. So here’s a deal: if you don’t want to see display/banner ads on Techdirt any more you don’t need to. Just go to your preferences page (whether you have an account or are just browsing without a login) and click the button saying you want to disable ads. And, that’s it. No more network display ads.
Fascinating idea. Good for them. If every site followed this lead, we could tune out the ads that offended, send back a clear message to the advertisers.
Ghostery finds 14 trackers on Techdirt.com and 20 scripts in total. Even if I disable ads, loading speed issues remain.
For me, ghostery went from 21 to 16 w/ turning off the Techdirt.com ads in the preferences
Basically: Turn off ads in our preferences and disable your ad blockers so we can inject trackers into our sites that don’t display ads.
No thank you.
This is a horrible idea. Sites need money to operate. Users just want them to make that money in a way that is not harmful to the users. This isn’t it.