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The online experience was effectively free of commercials and other distractions, which was a bit of a shame really because, to be honest, there really wasn't that much to browse.

Things have changed a lot in the last decade though, and now it's become hard to find a page that isn't littered with distracting animated GIFs, Flash banners or other annoying elements.

However, you have to admit that it's largely due to the existence of ads that the Web has become such a massive and, for the most part, free resource.

Most of those websites which tried to impose a subscription-based model on their visitors early-on died a rapid death, although there are a few, like Salon which have limped along on a semi-subscription basis.

Even after ad-banners became commonplace, I never really had much problem with them, largely because I tend to surf with my images off so as to squeeze the maximum performance out of my bandwidth-constrained connection.

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Likewise, I've never had annoy problems with those evil pop-ups/under/over ads which can be so irritating. That's because, until recently, I've tended to surf with scripting disabled.

Now, even though I still do most of my surfing with Netscape 4.5 with images and scripting disabled, I can always fire-up a copy of the good (but still a bit flaky) Firebird browser whenever I hit a site that demands scripting and/or images. Fortunately, this browser has automatic suppression of pop-ups so I still don't see them.

But things are changing in the online advertising marketplace.

However, now that a small, but increasing percentage of web surfers are arming themselves with software that blocks advertising elements such as banners and pop-up windows, the advertisers are fighting back with even more intrusive ways to pitch their wares.

According to an interesting story from the New York Times, some sites are now trialing full-screen video ads, just like the ones you watch on TV.

Video ads have been tried many times before and, each time, have been abysmal failures. Unless you've got really fast broadband, video is very slow to download and it's also very distracting when it's part of a page containing other content.

However, the bright-sparks who are pitching these full-size video ads reckon they've got those problems sussed. The ads will download in the background while you're browsing the page that triggers them and they only appear on your screen when you click off to another page -- supposedly having had plenty of time to load by then.

This is very bad news for NZ's broadband users!

Why?

Well if you're on a JetStream account with a low cap (say 500MB), you'll only have to regularly frequent a few of the websites that are carrying these ads to completely blow your data allocation for the month and start hitting that 20c/MB over-cap charge.

The worst thing is that, because this stuff is downloading quietly behind the scenes while you're reading a webpage, you won't know you've just wasted a goodly amount of money on downloading an ad you didn't want and possibly couldn't even afford to watch.

In my book, these ads are even worse than spam. The bandwidth cost of your average spam is only about 2-10Kbytes (just a fifth of a cent for over-cap DSL users) whereas a full-screen "15- or 30-second ad" playing at 30 frames per second will likely involve the download of at least several megabytes of data, costing as much as $0.50 a pop!

And speaking of unwanted DSL bills, here's an interesting usenet post that should sound a sobering reminder of what Telecom's outrageous charges for local broadband traffic can do to your bank account.

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