[whpalmer4]

Some of us just ignore the ads. Takes almost no time to configure and maintain :-)

[derekJAB]

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

Some of us just ignore the ads. Takes almost no time to configure and maintain :-)

My method too. Works every time.

I've never understood this obsession with blocking advertisements, especially as they effectively fund the "free" content online.

[Brian]

This is kind of a classic "your mileage may vary" situation, but out of curiosity, I set aside my preferences and restarted OmniWeb into my "All the stuff I read for entertainment" workspace.

That workspace opens 36 tabs onto a number of sites. Obviously, it's not a comprehensive test, but it does open tabs onto sites that include BBC & Google news, the New York Times, Slashdot, Politico, and a number of other fairly "big" websites.

I didn't enable the blacklist at all, but I did enable the "block images from third-party websites" rule, and the "block known ad sizes" preferences. For the sites I visit, at least, those two preferences blocked the vast majority of the ads, with the 'known ad sizes' one appearing to do the bulk of the work.

There were several sites where the "3rd party" one blocked too much content, but I was able to use the site specific preferences to disable the rules on those sites while leaving it active on others.

Kinda makes me want to go back and nuke the other regular-expression based rules I've added to my "real" preferences over the years. Aside from the ".swf" one that blocks flash files from running, I'm not sure they're doing me much good.

[Morto]

Originally Posted by Brian

the 'known ad sizes' one appearing to do the bulk of the work.

This is very much my experience. I don't have the 3rd party sites rule enabled because I find it blocks too much, but between known ad sizes and my blacklist:

/ads\..*\.net/
/ads\..*\.com/
/.*\.doubleclick\.net/
/.*\.googlesyndication\.com/
/ads\.telegraph\.co\.uk/
/.*\.facebook\.com/

I hardly see any ads at all. The only time I see ads from google is when I am on google's site, which isn't often since I switched to duckduckgo.