Computer users are bombarded with ads. It’s hard to go to a website and not see ads. Even websites like nytimes.com or cnn.com have ads. Google has filled search results with so many ads that most of us have been conditioned to just ignore them. Ads and content sites seem to be synoymous.

But now the ads are spreading! Desktop apps are being eaten by them too. Weatherbug swallows your screen with huge, obtrusive ads and videos. Twitterific is more tastefully ad supported (it displays just one small ad every half hour and it doesn’t take up your whole screen).

The good part about both Weatherbug and Twitterific is that they give you the option of paying to opt-out of the ads. For $19.95, Weatherbug gives you more features and no ads. Twitterific is ad-free for $14.95. This is an excellent solution. They can still fund future projects, but they don’t have to give users the inconvenience of ads.

But I think that no matter what options developers give users regarding ads vs. no ads, developers need to keep their ads unobtrusive. Users don’t like ads, but we tolerate ads to an extent. When you pass the threshold of reasonable advertising, users hate the product. A bit like I hate Weatherbug.

Websites are a bit more complicated. Twitter, for example, is not ad-supported yet, but in order to be a profitable company, it will probably have to be. Facebook already went down that road. That’s because there are really only two options to make a website, service, or app profitable: ads or payment of some sort. Twitter has indicated that it wants to be a global communication utility. It’s a lot harder to be global when you cut out the millions of people who can’t pay. So most websites turn to ads, but I really wish they wouldn’t!

I would much rather pay for Twitter than see it go down the ad-supported road. In fact, I would pay to have Google searches with no ads. While a pay-for-no-ads solution seems to be taking hold in the desktop app community, it has not yet reached online services and that’s annoying. In the past year, The New York Times discontinued its paid TimesSelect service which presented articles by certain columnists without ads. It was discontinued for a variety of reasons, but I strongly believe they should have an ad-free version of The New York Times online. I would pay a steep price for it too, if I continue to like The New York Times as much as I do now. There’s really no downside to doing this, unless I’m not thinking of something.

So I have suggestions for ad-supported apps, services, and sites. Number one: Don’t make the ads huge, like Weatherbug. It makes me want to uninstall the app and erase every trace of the disgusting over-adness. Take a leaf out of Twitterific’s book. Number two: Always give people the option of opting-out of ads for a fee.

If the end result is the same for the content or service provider (the end result being revenue), then giving the users more choice is better.

And one more thing in support of my plan, though it’s hard to measure or prove. As I mentioned above, we’ve been conditioned to ignore some ads (in Google searches, for example), so if ads become less common, then the value of the ads that we do see would go up. Whether or not this would actually make a measurable impact on ad values is impossible to ascertain.

If View from a Farley ever has ads (certainly in future plans), I will offer a paid alternative. I’m putting my money where my mouth is.