my biggest bombardment from ads comes from the tv. i am addicted. however, since canceling cable i don’t feel as bad about sitting through ads. at least i am not paying to be advertised to anymore.

i try to watch pbs as much as possible though and listen to npr or other listener supported radio stations when i don’t have my ipod handy.

I’m surprised no one has suggested this yet.

I can tell that I don’t get as much advertising exposure as the average person because I often feel out of the loop on things, like when people say, “You know that commercial for…” and I have no idea to what they’re referring. Or when people bring up products and I’ve never heard of them.

I just cannot stand the constant bombardment with advertising, news, noise, sounds, etc. What I do is limit my exposure to all of those things. It has a ton of benefits that come with it: silence and stillness right here at home. So it’s like I am away from the civilization at all times.

I don’t watch TV, I don’t listen to radio. I have an Ad Blocker on my browser. It works great. Just eliminate the distractions and focus on what matters. That is how look at life.

Advertising is trying to sell something I have no need for. It tries to create wants. If I need something, then I am going to go look it up and fine it on purpose. Otherwise: TURN IT OFF.

Turn off the noise and focus on the things that matter.

Have fun on your trip!

Best,
Tomas

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865

We found Tivo to be excellent at skipping all the commercials on TV. For the radio on road trips, we use our iPod most of the time. The ads on the side of the blogs and other websites don’t really bother me, but I hate the flash ads so I make sure it doesn’t happen on my computer.

Cutting out advertising is insanely liberating.

You stop being a passive receiver and transform into a proactive information consumer. You selectively let messages enter your life – ones that are relevant and in moderate amount.

By stopping unessential activities, most of the ads are naturally eliminated. If you listen to your own music player, watch your purchased videos, and visit only the sites of importance (rather than websurf or YouTube it up), you free up the information intake pipe greatly. Fewer ads, and those that do come through will be much more relevant than Jeep Mechanics for Your Jeep by Jeep Specialists.

I remember my first 2-week nature assimilation in Alaska – it felt so liberating to not have any messages at ALL come at me. None. Just pure nature. After landing back in Chicago, driving on the highway I noticed all the billboards. SO many messages, and most were pretty useless and transient. Some mediocre movie that’s opening this Friday. A 20% sale at some place that sells furniture you don’t need.

After becoming conscious of the amount of unessential messages bombarding me, I started making an effort to block them out. Not only ignoring public ads, but doing the selective information intake previously mentioned. And life is so much more liberating and empowering because of it.

Congrats on your ad crash diet April. Here’s to less garbage in our lives and more time and mental energy to focus on what we love rather than letting useless ads infiltrate that precious space.

Best,
Oleg

That said, when we’re traveling internationally (and if we scored a TV in the room we’re staying) we *love* to watch the commercials. Like Ash (#35) mentioned, they can be a great insight into whatever country we’re visiting.

Works doubly well since I am reading this at work – the smaller the window, the less obtrusuve my non-work activity is .

Also, I have a DVR, so I never watch live TV. No magazines or newspapers – I get everything online. And no car for me, so I only hear radio ads on the weekends when I am in the car with my hubby.

I admit though, I am out of touch sometimes with the newest gadgets and stuff – the good thing about ads is that they can keep your finger on the pulse of the up and coming new “toys” in the world.

We are lucky to have (and support) very good PBS and NPR stations, plus local independent radio stations. And when I do get to watch grownup TV, it’s usually on DVD.

What I found is that I kind of miss the ads on TV, because I am not very good at sitting still for half an hour or an hour at a time. The PBS cartoon shows have music videos every so often for that reason – apparently I’m just not as good at sitting still as other grownups.

The advertising that does work on me isn’t really advertising – the kind of product reviews that bloggers I read do are targeted to me way better than the ads on any TV show I’ve ever watched. Other than replacing clothes & shoes that wore out, I think half our spending the last few years has been media & gizmos I saw reviewed online.

And my second argument still stands. If you use AdBlock you will only have to pay a few seconds to avoid an add forever. That must be the cheapest way to get around online advertising.

If advertising works — that is to say, if advertising creates more revenue than it costs, then you’d be better off financially by paying the same amount that advertisers pay to show you the ads, except to keep from being shown them.

And I appreciate that most people dislike ads. However, I’ll admit that I’m a freak who enjoys advertising: when I’m visiting a new country, the ads speak volumes to me about the kind of culture and preferences that exist (remember the 50′s cleaning ads?) I also like marketing, so I enjoy analysing the more sophisticated ads: who is the company targeting?

Finally, I’ll chime in with Beth, who wanted to play devil’s advocate: advertising provides revenue to quite a few people, and it does increase the market for producers. So it may be annoying, but there’s a reason it exists.

Having said all this, I can’t remember when I last turned on my tv!

1. You lose very little from a page with (small, non-flashy) adds compared to a page without. If your choice is between paying 10cents for the page or paying 0cents + a bit of inconvenience, then you’d prefer the latter as long as the inconvenience is worth less than 10cents.

2. With AdBlock it will only take you a second to block an add and it will never be seen again. If your time is worth less than (10cent/second)/[number of times you would have seen this add in the future] than you gain a great deal from blocking rather than watching the add or paying the owner of the website not to show adds.

Apologies if my English is not perfect.

Or, in more general terms, if the world worked differently than it does, then the world would work differently than it does.

One more interesting item of note:
If advertisers are a better source of income for a website author than charging visitors to see his content, it implies that advertisers are willing to pay more than visitors for that content. This means that an advertiser values the influence they gain over you while viewing a page more than you value viewing that page in the first place. After all, if you’re not willing to pay $0.10 to view a page, but an advertiser is willing to pay $0.10 to show you that page, that means you’ve given up $0.10 worth of influence for a page that you didn’t value at $0.10. It’s not a fair bargain for you.