How to block ads

I got tired of looking at all the internet advertising and just install some ad-blocking software. Link to the article that inspired me, here. The plugins are for Firefox. Updating the hosts file was simple. I just searched for the file name "hosts" and then added the big list of advertisers to both files that were found. No more ads, but Yahoo looks weird.

Reflections on setting up a blog and Google

Recently, someone I was speaking with referred to Google as a one trick pony and that observation resonated with me. At the time, I remember thinking "Of course, they only make money on ads. Why are they wasting money on creating all of these other products that don't serve ads?"

In retrospect, I don't think that is right. A couple of observations. First, I am someone who creates content, in effect, I am a publisher who, if I am doing my job right, is increasing the number of useful pages the web has to offer. And there really are not that many folks who produce high quality content (I think the jury is still out on my, but I am in thee game, swinging) and, in general, that Google has good a relationship these folks. Second, the growth of Internet advertising is driven both by having willing advertisers (who create demand) but also of having more content (to drive supply). Google is working both sides of the equation by making it easy for advertisers to buy placements but also for savvy content creators to webify their content. . Let me tell you one way that Google is making content creation (and increasing supply) easy. At least for Bloggers.

I prefer integrated products. I have spent too much time in my life trying to get best of breed products to work (see this post.) Google has set Bloogger up as a more or less integrated blogging publishing platform. Actually, they allow you to select best of breed applications, but they make it easy to use their products. Even still , the point holds.

I routinely use 4 Google products to publish this bloq. I create my posts in Google Docs, publish directly to the blog, have embedded Ad-Sense advertising, and track site usage using Google analytics. So what does this have to do with increasing supply? Google has made it easy to not only publish and track performance, they have made it easy to serve ad-sense ads. I could use other vendors for word processing or ad serving of web analytics, but why would I. I am pretty sure that Google has made it so that all of their products are going to play nice with each other (and so far, they do), so why take the chance.

All this is to say that even though Google may seem like a 1 trick pony, they are really a 2 trick pony. And even though the first trick gets a lot of attention, the second trick, creating new distribution channels for their ads, is also a really good trick.