This Post Brought To You By...

Lately, I’ve begun to notice something about the internet, and that is that the advertisements seem to be taking over. I remember back in the early days of the web, shortly after Al Gore got it up and running in his garage, where you didn’t really have to worry about ads, but like everything that draws an audience, they soon came. At first it seemed to be mostly pop-ups, if my time-ravaged memory serves me right, but pop-up blockers did a pretty good job of nullifying them, and so life was good. However, ever since then it’s been a steady decline until we get to where we’re at today, which is complete ad saturation.

Whoops, hold on.

All right, sorry about that. Just had to pay a few bills. Anyway, it now seems that advertisements take up roughly fifty percent of every screen. It’s a given that the margins, top, bottom, right, and left, are going to be crawling with ads with headlines such as the following:

If You Drive Less Than 40 Miles Per Day, You Are Being Ripped Off By Not Using This One Ridiculously Easy Loophole

1 Weird Sleep Trick

57 Year Old Woman Looks 27

51 Year Old Mom Looks 27

Work From Your Home 10 Minutes A Day And Make One Thousand Dollars An Hour While Losing 10 Pounds In 3 Days And Sharpening Your Eyesight By 89 Percent While Also Clearing Acne And Building A Six Pack Of Abs You Can Grate Cheese On This Is Not A Joke Seriously Have Your Credit Card Ready

The sad thing is, I only made up one of those headlines. Now, while these headlines are typically amusing at first, after a while they become pretty annoying. Luckily, you can usually ignore them fairly easily, since they’re off to the side, and - whoa, hold on, gotta take another break.

Again, sorry about that. As I was saying, you can normally ignore the margin advertisements, but I’ve begun to see more and more ads that automatically splash over half of the screen, and you have to wait a certain amount of time before you can close them and actually view the content. Those ones are annoying.

There are also video ads, where a video automatically starts playing, whether you like it or not. Worse, at least in my opinion, in when an ad pops up when your mouse hovers over certain text on a website, even if for the briefest moment. It’s sort of like when somebody hides on you and then jumps out and yells at the top of their lungs, scaring the bejeezers out of you, except on the internet you can’t punch the perpetrator in order to take your revenge.

So, as you can see – What? Another one? Really? Stupid stalled economy.

Anyway, I guess the only question now is how much more intrusive will ads get? I’m wondering if it'll get to the point where you’ll have to put in your credit card number just to make an advertisement go away so you can see what’s behind it. Wanna see the punch line to the joke? Pay up! Wanna see the final paragraph to a blog? Pay Up! If you don’t like it, talk to Al Gore!