OT-ish, adverts was RE: Dr. Dobbs to cease?

[der Mouse]

>> Just exactly how well will the age-old advertising methods work
>> online, especially with everyone and their brother using things like
>> ad-block?
> Make your adverts not be annoying.  [...]

Yes, but...

> They're annoying.  Don't be annoying.

Right.  But what's annoying differs, sometimes drastically, from person
to person.  I, for example, find _any_ piggybacked advertising
annoying, even print ads in print magazines.  (Provided they stay only
mildly annoying, I usually tolerate them, but it's definitely
toleration of an annoyance.)  I will not tolerate TV unless I can at
least mute the ads.  And I'm _very_ ad-averse in "online" content (even
if not actually online, eg in email), to the point where even things
like two-line "free" email footer ads annoy me; I've been known to,
when replying to email bearing them, quote them and reply as if I
thought the email's author wrote them, as a form of comment on them.
Ads are a major fraction of why I don't use the Web to any substantial
extent.

I wrote Illiad a cheque (after some emailed negotiation) rather than
put up with the ads on userfriendly (this was before I discovered xkcd;
these days I never even look at userfriendly).  When my annoyance
tolerance is low I will even do stuff on my computers rather than watch
hockey games, because of the bloody annoying ads - and for me ignoring
a hockey game really says something.  (I don't have a TV, but when
visiting my gf on the weekends I sometimes watch hers when there's
something I find interesting enough to overcome my general aversion to
the medium.)

I've had marketing people try to tell me that customers don't mind ads.
But - well, for example, I recently saw an ad on a municipal bus
trumpeting that some radio station would, for a certain few hours every
week, run ad-free; that they thought this worth plugging (despite the
irony of an ad trumpeting ad-free-ness) says to me that claims
customers don't mind ads are..somewhere on the spectrum between
overgeneralization and delusion.

Yeah, I know.  "Ads pay for content."  No they don't - or rather, they
do only at the surface level.  The truth is more like, the advertiser's
customers pay for the content, filtered through (and with a cut skimmed
off by) the advertisers' advertising departments.  I would _much_
rather pay directly for the content and _not_ pay advertising
departments' pounds-of-flesh for damn near everything I buy.
(Interestingly enough, the things I buy are almost disjoint from the
products being advertised in the ads I see - I've often seen an ad and
wished I were in the market for its product so I could avoid that
advertiser.)  Especially when I'm already nominally paying for the
content anyway - eg, a movie ticket, a cable TV subscription, or, to
pick an example that's actually closer to reasonable for me, a print
magazine.

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