Not just you. I think it's a societal reaction to being annoyed.
I actually liked the idea of tailored ads, originally. I wasn't rushing to give them my details, but I figured I was bombarded by ads anyway (this was back when google was the new crazy people thinking they could topple AltaVista, X10 pop-under ads were everywhere, and populating your /etc/hosts with false entries was your only adblocker) so it'd be nice to have those ads have a chance to be interesting.
But they didn't do what I wanted, or they barely did it. Instead they warred with the content I was trying to read, and they could go all out.
It's even a painful circle:
- a site has good content, but needs to pay costs, so they put up ads
- the ad companies get some results, but want more, so they make pushier, flashier, more animated ads
- Perhaps people find the content not worth this visual abuse, so they move on. Meaning the site is making less from the ads, so they put in more ads out of necessity.
Rinse, lather, repeat. (Though I really have no idea if that third step happens. It may just be the first two)
Perhaps if/when we have a real micropayments solution this can break, but currently any content that is paid for by ads tends to have only one-way incentives - be it the ads on TV, the radio DJs that have to rave about crap products, or whatever, we the audience can't _effectively_ vote with our dollars AGAINST the ads, so they have practically no limit to how pushy they get. (The ads in movie theaters aren't there to cover "free" content, but I've heard the margins in running a theatre are very thin, and you're still sort of a captive audience)
I wonder if that's because ad companies are inherently dystopic, or because ad companies are paying huge amounts of money to be constantly in everyone's head, and thus come easily to mind when thinking of possible futures (or indeed, anything else).
