Unfortunately no. I'm just a fool!

I just spent 15 minutes trawling through ninemsn.com.au, news.com.au, zdnet.com.au & gadgetguy.com.au trying to find some good examples of web advertising banners for a client of mine and i could not for the life of me find a single web banner.

I thought I was loosing my mind. Where had all the advertising gone? Has the whole world conspired to abolish web banners without telling me?

Then it dawned on me! I saw this little red icon in the bottom right of my FireFox window.

Apparently Ad Block Plus a nifty little FireFox extension was doing its job perfectly. It was blocking all traces of banner ad's and because the sites that I was viewing were built using liquid CSS the gaps where the ad's should have been were simply closed up. Not a trace of advertising to be seen. I didn't even realise it was running and had been since this computer was configured.

As a quick experiment to really see how much advertising there was out there now I turned off Ad Block Plus and no the world has not conspired to abolish web advertising. Ad's have gotten bigger and flashier than ever! Not that there is anything wrong with that. I can certainly see that there is a definite need for advertising as it helps to pay for all of the free content I am getting.

Unfortunately for me I find banners very distracting and often draw me away from the content I want to read. Congratulations Advertisers you have done your job I am drawn to click! Unfortunately for you I can turn you off and focus on the story at hand.