Getting rid of Webpage Ads
Webpages can contain all kinds of ads, that are often annoying. These can be removed with special ad blocking software, though.
Removing ads from webpages
On some webpages, ads draw so much attention that is actually hard to read the text that you came to read there in the first place. One wonders whether publishers even care about their content, other than as a means to draw visitors to see the advertising. It seems they consider their visitors mere "eye-balls," only there to consume their ads.
It is a pity that ads on webpages often are so annoying. It's an entirely different state than ads in magazines and newspapers, that are way easier to ignore if you think they're not interesting. The animation, that attracts lots of attention in the corners of your eyes, is what's the trouble. It's very tempting for designers to use animation in ads, but this, unfortunately is what's making ads so annoying, drawing way more attention than they deserve.
A simple way to not see ads, is not using your browser at its maximum window size. Most ads are at the right, so when you resize the browser window, and make it just as wide as the information you want, ads are not visible. Ads at the top will not distract you if you scroll down a bit as the first thing you do when you open a new webpage.
How to filter out ads on webpages
It is also possible to filter out banner ads from webpages, using special software. This makes surfing the web a more relaxed experience, without all the animated ads that distract you from what you're interested in.
If you use the Firefox web browser, you're lucky that a very popular and free add-on is available that blocks most of the advertising from webpages. This is Adblock Plus. It uses lists of what to block.
Add-ons for Firefox are easy to install, from the menu Tools ->Add-ons, or from the Mozilla Add-ons website.
Adblock Plus is also available for Google's Chrome browser.
Ad Muncher works for most web browsers. It functions right out of the box, and has lots of features for blocking ads. For the average user this software may, however, not be simple enough.
Pop-ups
Pop-up ads used to be a pest on the internet, but nowadays pop-up blockers are built into most webbrowsers. You should be able to turn them off.
Malware in ads - Malvertising
There have been several known instances of criminals using ads on popular and trusted websites to infect computers with viruses and other malware. This is referred to as malvertising (see for instance ZDNet.com security blog articles here and here). The criminals were able to deliver their malicious ads through big ad delivery networks.
Being protected from that could be an additional reason to block ads from webpages, as not all of these malicious intrusions are stopped by antivirus software.