Grrr . . . I’m thinking that many website designers assume everyone has high-speed, unlimited Internet usage, and that’s why they post videos that play automatically on their pages.
Well, news flash to all website designers: not all of us have unlimited download capabilities. I live in a remote area — as do many Canadians — that is not served by high-speed landlines, so I have limited Internet access. I use a Rogers mobile stick for the hefty sum of $50 a month, which gives me a mere 2GB of downloading. That’s a little more than 2,000MB per month, which is fine for writing/retrieving emails, blogging and even doing some research so that I can write my blogs. But watching videos is out of the question: they use up too much of my download allowance.
I don’t mind websites with news stories that have one video at the top of a page that plays automatically after it appears on the screen. It’s simple enough to stop — just click the little box on the left at the bottom of the video. But I accessed one site today — while doing research for this blog — that has what appears to be a series of small, square ads (seven, I think) on the right-hand side of the page, which I paid no attention to while I started reading the article. Midway through, I discovered the little ads were, in fact, videos that had all started playing — and had cost me 18MB of download allowance. I closed the page without reading any more of the article . . . and I feel burned.
So, while it cost me 18MB on that page to read half an article, it has cost me a mere 700.445KB — less that 1 MB — to write this post. Of course, it’s not the subject I planned to write about this morning, and I’ll have to wait till I get to the office so that I can continue my research there — during my dinner break, of course, not on company time because blogging is not part of my job: it is a labour of free love.
OK, so why am I being such a grinch this morning? Well, an alert from Rogers warned me that I have surpassed 75 percent of my monthly usage allowance, and I still have six days to go before the counter is reset.
Sigh . . . (Oops, that long sigh put this post over the 1MB mark!)
Cheers
Jillian
Jillian Page 
I’m with you on this — and I even have a faster unlimited service and a computer running Windows 7. I don’t want to wait for one, and pages that start shouting or playing music at me without me requesting it makes me LIVID!
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It must be incredibly difficult without high speed access. I’m a Rogers customer and even though I’m paying through the nose I just have to have my high speed internet.
Kaye
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My services is high speed, I think, but I have limited downloading as mentioned in the post. Plus, because I am in the forest here, service is hit and miss at times, so sometimes service can be slow.
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Bummer! 😦
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I use the (free/open-source) Mozilla Firefox browser with AdBlock+ & NoScript & Ghostery addons, & see very few ads at all!, almost never that ‘side’/pop-up stuff, & never at all get those annoying side-ad-vids you’re talking about here… to the extent I can NOT stand anymore using a computer with the unprotected Internet Explorer internet-browser… it’s a totally different online experience.
Should you wish to try Firefox, to begin with, of the 3 addons mentioned I suggest only installing AdBlock+, as it generally just runs quietly on-its-own in the background & the only time you need do anything with it is if you want to temporarily disable it for a particular page/site (will rarely block a vid you do want to see, but is only a click-or-2 away from allowing).
If, using AdBlock+ only, you’re still getting unwanted stuff, then consider adding one-or-both of the other addons. Ghostery, & especially NoScript, while not at all difficult to use, do require some more interaction, especially at first until they ‘get to know’ the usual sites you go to all the time & you’ve set them to ‘Allow’ those sites’ basics. So, ya’ should spend a little time with their help/options to gain at least rudimentary understanding about how they work & how you can temporarily, or permanently, “Allow” particular scripts &or trackers.
Firefox:
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/
(BTW: Google’s Chrome browser IS spyware, defeating the purpose altogether, so not recommended.)
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Thanks . . . I will look into all of this!
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Some years back the company I worked for developed their first web-based system. The developers went crazy with the scripting and the first page involved several megabytes of data before you could do anything at all.
Needless to say the product (and the company) failed.
Much of the internet is supported by advertising, and the advertisers who are paying the bills are going to go to great lengths to make sure that their ads are seen, whether we like it or not.
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