Has anyone else noticed this recent rash of video adverts on websites? It might be because this PC is new and I havent had chance to install Ad Blocker Plus to FireFox yet but I seem to be catching more and more of them.
Originally as I recall they were "click to play" type affairs which played a short (or even long) advert when you clicked on them. Now though it seems they are quite happy to play with a simple mouse over (which is easy enough to do by accident) or even just play by default. And to add insult to injury many dont bother to start muted and give the option to add sound.
Surely this is fairly unethical. Image based adverts hardly tax your bandwidth or browser resources but flash movies could potentially be 10's of MB's in size. Just a few of them auto-starting jobbies a week could start to add up.
In the future I am sure it wont be a problem - with super fast broadband and no caps. But sadly a lot of people are currently plagued by these limts; and indeed they are often so low (several GB's) that streamed adverts could take up a reasonable percentage of it.
Which seems fairly rude to me: these adverts could be costing US £'s per month to view - and they dont even have the politness to wait to see if we want to watch them. I guess the solution is to flick ABP on but the practice in general just seems a bit wrong to me.