Whew, when I read the title, I thought they meant in-game ads. I don't see whats wrong with advertising games on gaming websites. Blizzard has such a limited, yet immensly popular collection of titles, I don't see why they wouldn't want the extra cash, and Massive isn't really competition.

Simple solution: Firefox + Adblock Plus
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865

If everybody uses Adblock, then eventually there will be no free useful content on the Internet. Somebody has to pay for the service, and advertisers will not do it any more.

No one asked how to block the ads, or even looked at it from that perspective. Not to mention that if they were in-game ads, Adblock wouldn't do jack shit to stop it.

Its funny how you come on this site (which I'm surely is largely if not wholly funded by ads) and read content for free, but then make some asinine comment like you're fightin' the man with your Adblock Plus.

The vast majority of all free content online is Ad sponsored... I've used Adblock too and there sure isn't anything wrong with it, but it really ticks me off when people spout off like they've just changed all our lives by blocking our Ads... like we're just not with it enough to know that Adblock has been there for years now. Its old news and no one cares.

Besides, if your goal was to share with everyone how to get rid of the Ads, you might as well just go into your hosts file and point Google, Yahoo, Toms, and millions of other sites to localhost, cause if everyone did this...the only free thing on the net would be Linux...and by now even thats practically just online advertising for the paid support and server distros you can buy.

"This doesn’t mean that you’ll start seeing billboards peppered all throughout your nightly raids, as the advertising deal specifies that Massive will deliver ads to Blizzard’s websites and Battle.net."

As the article states they are not providing in-game advertisements.

Dial-up users have a different perspective of advertisements since they account for more than half the data transferred on most any web page. Even on broadband I don't appreciate pop-up and pop-under advertisements.

If they are going to put adds on the website, then they should drop the subscription fee by $5.

11 Million x $5 = $55 Million lost a month due to your moronic idea. If I was Blizzard I'd totally do it.

I'm aware they aren't in game. That was meant hypothetical.

I also said I don't think there is anything wrong with it. Dialup users probably do benefit tons, it speeds up browsing even for broadband users, and it is in fact great for mischevious ads.

I'm just getting sick of the fact that every single time there is an article that has anything to do with ads someone spams their crap about adblock, usually as if its the second coming.

This article nor any of the comments above yours mentioned a desire to block the ads, and it just seemed a little cocky with your being all "Simple solution:" like we didn't already know how to solve this problem that...well, we even didn't seem to have.

The Internet as it is runs on ads and no one cares who doesn't like it. No ads, no money; no money, no content...its not real difficult.

And nekatreven is foaming at the mouth to get a piece of the ACTION. You can't wait to be rolling in all the blow and hookers you can handle, right?

Advertisers are parasites, the internet did just fine without them and will continue to do so. In fact, large portions of the internet were off-limits to commerce, but parasites are difficult to fully eradicate unless you keep a constant watchful eye...and they love hookers and blow.

AdBlock FTW.
without that I wouldnt be able to tolerate tomshardware - say nothing about other sites.

yes us broadband users have the bandwidth for downloading the adds, but what about the cpu time and gpu time spent blasting said adds all over the webpages? IMO thats the REAL slowdown from advertising.

Yeah, especially when browsing on a netbook. Nothing like 4-5 flash ads to crash my little Via C7 processor or completly fill my 800x480 screen. Of course, I use Opera + Block Content + UserJavascript to block flash WITH the option of playing it if I want to.

Excluding the days where the Internet connected only universities and government agencies... the Internet as a consumer-used item has had more years WITH rampant, over the top advertising, than without. You said its done fine without, even though it wasn't without. So your statement there is hard to justify.

It's also pretty ironic you'd mention hookers and the Internet's...health, I suppose...in the same comment.

The Internet really only ever got out of universities and government agencies to support the porn industry; it would have died otherwise. VHS was no different...the VCR was not for Disney movies! Even in the recent high def format war that went on, Toms ran at least one article stating that the porn industry's preference of HDDVD due to cost could be a significant factor...not enough of one though, obviously.

Finally, I think it's funny how fluent you seem to be with the proper usage of drug jargon...even if you had said something intelligent...that alone would make me wonder if you were worth listening to.