Blocking of Advertisements

	rbmix.com

Many companies spend a lot of money on advertising on the web and many websites get a lot of their revenue from advertising . All these advertisements consume a lot of bandwidth. There are lots of pop-up adverts on some websites . The latest fad seems to text advertisements which are a lot less intrusive than the old banners and pop-ups. Even the free page counters on some websites are just small image advertisements hosted on some third party sites.

Some of the text-ad's and image-ad's are served by third-party servers and the advertisers can easily log the browsing patterns of the website users if they want.

There are a lot of ad-blockers available on the internet. A particularly useful tool(freeware) is adblock extension for firefox browser (website). Most of the blockers come preconfigured with a blocklist to which new sites can be added. In adblock wildcards can also be used. Offensive images can be blocked by just a right click and using the adblock image option.

Another method is properly using the hosts file. This file associates website names with ip addresses. This property can be used for blocking by setting offending advertising servers to point to 127.0.0.1 . An advantage of the host file method is that it ip connections via various protocals like http, ftp etc. But this requires a bit more technical knowhow. But there are many free block lists available on the internet. Remember that the host file may sometimes be locked by some firewalls. Also large host files may sometimes slow down the machine. Another problem is that wildcards like * do not work in host file method. This method will also not block the advertisements served by the site being browsed by you.

(Also note that associating the correct ip addresses of frequently browsed sites with their sitenames in the host file might increase your browsing speed)

Cookies served by advertising servers can be used to track the browsing patterns of users. There are options in most of the browsers to block third party cookies.

What I am wondering is how many of the actual advertisers use such ad-blockers while they browse the net. The advertisers are also human beings and may not be very happy to close multiple popups while browsing. They might also have enough technical knowledge to use and tweak the ad-blockers so that they do not see a lot of advertisements

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