Whether we’re watching TV, listening to Spotify or driving down a highway, we’re all under constant assault by advertisements.
Many problems plague Web advertisements in particular.
They’re susceptible to malware, can promote scams, may automatically play videos and sounds, and collect sensitive personal information.
Worst of all, they simply make websites difficult to read.
This is where ad blockers come into play.
Ad-blocking tools modify Internet browsers so they fail to load advertisements on web pages.
Ad-blocking has become a serious threat to Web publishers.
Enough of the general population was frustrated to the point of installing an ad blocker that they significantly cut into Internet revenue generation.
A 2015 study by Reuters indicates 47 percent of the United States population uses some sort of ad-blocking tool when browsing the Web.
In economic terms, PageFair and Adobe estimate a near-$22 billion loss in revenue for Web publishers.
Because of this, many websites have begun to switch to subscription-based services and appealing to the users.
Even with the major economic effect for Web publishers, I can’t say I regret blocking advertisements.
In fact, I encourage more people to do the same.
When it comes to the lost revenue, Internet services only have to gaze in a mirror to assign blame.
In 2012, most major websites began tracking users in order to show ads in spite of ad blockers. At the time, the reasoning was obvious.
The invention of behavioral advertising means tracking users through advertisements generated a nice bit of profit.
Even still, Web publishers got greedier.
They outsourced the advertisements to less-than-reliable, but cheap, third-party marketing companies and added videos and sounds that automatically played.
I don’t block advertisements because I don’t want to support a website.
I block websites because I should not have to worry about being damaged by a virus.
If a website wants me to turn off my ad-blocking software, I expect it to abide by the reasonable terms set out in the Acceptable Ads Initiative: “Acceptable ads are not annoying, do not disrupt or distort the page content we’re trying to read, are transparent with us about being an ad, are effective without shouting at us and are appropriate to the site that we are on.”
In what commentators have called the “Ad-Blocking Wars,” Web publishers have no one to blame but themselves.
If they want to mitigate the problem, there is an easy fix.
If not, I can only encourage everyone else to keep blocking advertisements.
sshahsav@indiana.edu
