Ad Blockers Working To Get Rid Of Annoying Flash Ads

Techdirt has an interesting post on the continuing battle between ad blockers and advertisers:

Most people know that lazy (bad) marketers are never going to realize that forcing annoying ads on people is not the proper way to build a sustainable business, but is it too much to hope that some will realize there's a better way? These days they just seem to move from one bad idea to another. As more and more people have started using pop-up blockers, advertisers are increasingly switching to "rich media" ads, usually using Flash technology, that takes over the browser to display some ad, rather than what the surfer is looking for. That is, instead of realizing that people don't want to see their ads, and maybe such intrusive and annoying solutions are a bad idea - they just find new intrusive and annoying methods that get around the blockers. As we were just discussing, this pisses people off, because it screws up the reason they're online. Pissing off your potential customers doesn't seem like a good long term strategy. Already, the various ad blockers are working to block out these rich media ads as well, and we can be pretty sure that these same lazy marketers will put what little effort they have into coming up with another annoying and intrusive ad campaign - rather than figuring out how to deliver something people want.

No business ever won a war with their customers. Ad blockers exist not simply because readers don't like looking at advertising, but because online advertising sucks up so much bandwidth that it interferes with the reader's experience. Readers don't want to wait for the ads to download so they can look at their favorite web site. There must be ways of creating inviting banner ads that download easily and generate enough interest to drive traffic to the advertisers web site.