Advertising Examples
December 20, 2005 7:05 AM   Subscribe

I'm looking for websites with lots of adverts, or sites that have the most egregious use of online advertising.

Currently, I filter ads using a modified hosts file, I also use a custom CSS document to block things. I want to make some comparisons between several different methods of ad-blocking and measure their efficacy, but I need some really good examples to tease out any differences.
posted by gsb to Computers & Internet (13 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
I think you're looking for BoingBoing.net.
posted by chunking express at 7:14 AM on December 20, 2005


Million Dollar Homepage? Try ad-blocking that!
posted by GuyZero at 7:18 AM on December 20, 2005


I think you're looking for BoingBoing.net.

...or maybe boingboing.net.net?
posted by soundofsuburbia at 7:20 AM on December 20, 2005


You could surf porn or gaming sites.
posted by Pollomacho at 7:22 AM on December 20, 2005


The Northfield News is a local paper that has a site which is recognized as truly crapatacular.
posted by unixrat at 7:33 AM on December 20, 2005


Million Dollar Homepage? Try ad-blocking that!

Of course as soon as you mention this, I am forced by internet law to counter with this: The Billion Dollar Home Page
posted by poppo at 7:43 AM on December 20, 2005


I recommend Flashkit, which I find unusable thanks to all the ads.
posted by O9scar at 8:20 AM on December 20, 2005


pitchforkmedia.com. I used to go there daily to see what came out. Now I go every two weeks or so as the ads are ridiculous.
posted by dobbs at 8:41 AM on December 20, 2005


About.com is pretty horrendous. The ads take up about 50% of the page and are staggered in a way that makes it really, really hard to find the "content".
posted by the jam at 9:24 AM on December 20, 2005


Try the Pro Wrestling Insider:

http://www.pwinsider.com/

It's not only jam-packed with every annoying ad you would wanna see, but also horribly designed...
posted by punkrockrat at 9:44 AM on December 20, 2005


Boondocks Net (http://www.boondocksnet.com/) is a great resource of Mark Twain writings, anti-Imperialism editorials and images, and other historical goodies, rendered unuseable by pop-ups, pop-unders, scrolling banners, and pages that are 50% or more advertising. You click on a page to read Twain's anti-imperialist writings and you gets ads for Oreck vacuums, online dating, and spyware installers. Twain would be livid!

Which is really damn sad because it used to be one of my favorite sites and has some wonderful content beneath the crud. But I never go there anymore.
posted by LarryC at 10:18 AM on December 20, 2005


Response by poster: skallas, that's the hosts file I used as a template! You deserve a considerable amount of praise for that. I mean, I religiously try to avoid that crap, but you dive into that shit... for us. Thanks man.

I should add that I'm thinking of creating a pet project about this, taking screenshots of the before and after with as many tools as possible. I was prompted by the physical shock of a colleague when I showed her what a custom CSS file could do. And with tools like Paparazzi this could be easy to demonstrate.
posted by gsb at 12:01 PM on December 20, 2005


Thank god for Adblock. After comparing some of these sites in Firefox vs. IE... holy hell!
posted by caution live frogs at 7:37 AM on December 21, 2005


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