Why Your Web Site Should Be "Advertisement Free"

Many web sites are filled with advertisements. Superficially, this might seem harmless enough and maybe a source of a little bit of pocket change. But in fact it presents a tremendous vulnerability for each and every user who visits your site! Allow us to explain.

When your web site contains HTML that triggers an advertisement, the request is sent by the browser of your site's visitor. It is sent to an advertisement broker which allows companies to literally bid, in real time, for the chance to serve an advertisement.

The trouble is that this very-identifiable information is sent, first to the broker, then to every advertiser who is bidding. This is a tremendous amount of personal information to be "spewing," and you have no idea where it goes. Neither does your unsuspecting site visitor. Many advertisers bid only enough to keep the advertising-broker interested: the data that they really want to "harvest" is the bid requests themselves.

In addition to the very obvious problem that the winning advertisement might well be from your competitor, this amount of "data disclosure" is both unwise and, really, unconscionable. It is also a severe detriment to your perceived site loading time. When people come to your web site, they should encounter only your business. They really don't want to be bothered by advertisements, and they certainly don't want to be thereby giving information about themselves away to data-mining strangers.

P.S.: You might have already noticed that your "ad blocker" has no work to do when you visit this web site ...