Free ad-blocker software solves that problem on all websites. I use Ad Blocker Plus as an add-on to my Mozilla Firefox browser. Not an ad to be seen anwhere. ( I leave it switched off on the ME site to support the forum and its sponsors.)

Hopper, I also use the same software. It makes a huge difference to the viewability of many sites.

Nigel, I agree the quickly flashing ads under the "support our sponsers" banner is very distracting.

regards

I agree that many websites are unreadable due to poorly placed ads and indeed lathes.co.uk seems to have gone a bit OTT with ad placement. I would however just wave a bit of flag for the website owners/suppliers who rely on the income to offset the cost of providing the site.

I fall into this category my Journeyman's Workshop site has ads but I hope they don't deter readers, they may even provide the occasional useful link. The ads basically pay for the hosting, domain charges and even help a bit towards the ISP costs. I try to place ads sensibly so that they don't interfere with the subject matter but still may get read and clicked on. Google of course keep asking me to put in more or even worse to let them put in ads wherever they want, no chance of that happening.

Placement of ads is ultimately down to the website owner/creator who has complete control over how many and where they appear. Unfortunately some owners/creators seem to think that they should put in more and more ads just to generate revenue. This ultimately is a bad idea as visitors will just 'click on by' and you won't get any revenue at all. It's all a matter of balance.

John

I don’t have much objection to text and picture ads anywhere, even if they flash at you; they don’t usually stop you from viewing the content you’ve come to see, after all; they just wave and wink at you trying to get your attention.

Video ads on, say, Youtube are another matter; they do temporarily stop you from viewing the content you’ve come to see and have lately got so frequent and intrusive on most popular Youtube channels that without something like Adblock Pro, which I use, the site would now be practically unusable.

This is entirely intentional, of course: Youtube want to make the ads so annoying that you start paying for Youtube Premium, rather than surf for free. Apparently they are already trialling an adblock blocker to ensure that visitors with adblock software installed who haven’t subscribed to Youtube Premium once again experience the full inescapable annoyance of the ads.

Drowning a previously popular site in adverts was in the past an indication that the owner of the site had changed, had no future plans for the site but wanted to extract the most money in the short term. Is Tony still in charge – I recall my only involvement with him some years ago and had the impression I was dealing with an old man in that I received completely the wrong documentation, but seemed to have been charged for what I wanted, raised the point but got no sensible reply – in the end gave up as wasn’t worth chasing the small sum.

Unlikely that Google hijacked it, though it is possible that the site was hacked. Just tried lathes.co,uk to see where the ads were coming from and although my blocker zapped 51 links, they don't appear when I turn the blocker off, though the layout isn't quite normal. Could be because the site owner is busy fixing the problem!

Two basic ways a web-site can host adverts:

• It can store and serve them just like any other content. Forum Members ads are managed this way, as are most of the commercial ads on screen right. Site admin controls these, but behind the scenes there will be an administrator selling space, collecting fees etc. Could be a part time job on a small site, or a big team on a popular website. As admin is expensive and unpopular, it's common to outsource it, with some loss of control.
• Most web advertising is served by third-party specialists, not by individual websites. The website attracts people by publishing something of interest and because this costs money, there is usually some way of recovering the costs, often advertising. Instead of the website owner hosting and administering adverts himself, he embeds links to a third-party ad-server. When the link is activated by a user, the ad-server dispenses an advert, counts clicks, does all the admin, and dispenses the money. As it services many websites, it can track users, and sell or buy similar data from other ad-vendors.

So an ad could be:

• provided by the website owner, or.
• dispensed by a third-party:
  • randomly, or
  • targetted on the individual based on cookies left on his system by other websites, or
  • targetted on the individual based on a profile built over time by tracking his internet activity over a long time, probably from multiple services.

There are layers of sophistication in ad-serving. For example, advertisers will pay extra to get themselves promoted on a popular web-site used by the sort of well-heeled people who buy their products. As there is hot competition to advertise on popular websites, it's possible for ad-servers to auction ad-space on the fly, getting the best price per click for the website owner. Done by software: those wishing to place an ad run code to analyse the users profile and calculate how much putting an advert on his screen is worth to them. Highest bidder wins. For example a US vendor would pay more for an advert if user's profile revealed previous enthusiastic buying in the US, and might not bid at all with an casual cheapskate outside the US.

Another approach is to shotgun blast users with adverts in the hope that one of them will hit the target. This approach is extremely annoying and it's probably the main reason most people install ad-blockers, and only enable ads on sites they approve of. (I'm using Firefox with AdBlocker Ultimate)

This being an imperfect world, these systems aren't 100% effective and they can be abused. In the past I mentioned lathes.co.uk emitted a clue that security of its information section wasn't top-priority, and such simple clues attract evil-doers looking for an easy score. (The shop part was better secured.) Maybe Tony decided to make money by advertising and allowed too many, maybe he's the victim of a cuckoo hacker using him as a free advertising springboard. There are other possibilities, we may never know…

Dave

The only advert I've seen on lathes.co.uk is one at the bottom of some pages for a ski school. Which I thought was an odd choice for machinists and, given the current heatwave, rather optimistic.

Using Firefox with Facebook Container, Malwarebytes Browser Guard and uBlock Origin add-ons.

As an aside, a thread I posted on the other day seems to have completely disappeared – it was started by Michael Gilligan and just pointed people to the Youtube channel of Chronova Engineering. Just wondered why it had gone, but not bothered enough to start a completely new thread asking about it

Rob