Internet Advertisements seem to be the backbone of the net right now. Without them, we wouldn't have all these services for free, and many great websites wouldn't even be here. But, do we need so many ads? Take a look at MacAddict.com and MacCentral.com for some great examples of overused ads.

These sites must be full of unsightly ads for a reason. Just like TV or radio commercials, the people who sponser these ads pay the person to place the ad on their website. The more times someone sees an add, the more money the webmaster gets paid. So, some people figure that if they put 10 ads for the same thing on their page, they will get 10 times as much money. This may be true, but it can also be costly in server costs, and lost visitors.

Webmasters aren't the only ones to benefit from these ads, all of us do as well. In fact, this site is completely free because Geocities puts out thousands of ads a day. No one using the net can get away from it. Without these ads, we may have to pay a small fee at every site we visit. Also, tons of sites give away products every day. How can they do this? With ad revenue of course.

But, we all know that these ads don't bring complete joy to our life. They are slow to load, usually quite ugly, and sometimes detract from the quality of a web site. Sure, we may get free information/products because of these ads, but is it really worth our time? Normally, because the advertisements are served off a completely different server, and use complex scripts, the load time substanuously increases.

Also, take a good look at MacCentral and MacAddict. Many of the ads are for the same products, services, or shopping places. They are almost all aminated, and look horendous. Plus, the reader can easily be destracted by these blinking things in front of our eyes, taking our attention away from the real content. The Webmasters know this, so they make more and more ads, to get increased revenue, and take time away from the content, reducing the quality of the entire site. It's a quite viscous circle.

Sure, we all know about these ads, but what can we do about them? Here are some ideas. We could stop clicking on them altogether, yeah right, like that will happen. We could complain until we are red in the face, like that would ever work. We could donate money to the sites, so they don't have to place ads, but who has that kind of money? What can we do?

The way I see it, we can't do much. We are pretty much at the mercy of these webmasters. The only way we can stop this bombardment of ads, is by stop visiting websites. And I don't see that happening any time soon. If the webmasters want us to see ads, we will see ads. It's really quite sad that our "information superhighway" has turned into this. One day, this may be the downfall of the Internet.