I’m not ashamed to say I carry a particularly strong distaste for Internet advertising. It’s irritating and out of touch, and the core premise of most online advertising models is fundamentally broken. For every advertisement I saw that caught my eye; every well-designed, unique, creative marketing campaign, I was treated to about twenty which made me grit my teeth and rub my temples in irritation.
Now that I have an ad blocker, I’m happy to say I get to browse in relative silence, without having to deal with all that aggravating white noise. It’s nice.
Of course, some people would have you believe I’m a mean, bad, terrible person for using an ad blocker. That having such a browser extension installed means I’m essentially stealing information, using bandwidth and consuming data without providing a shred of revenue to the site. Essentially, I’m causing them to lose money on every click: I don’t see the ads, the advertisers don’t get a return from their investment, and the site doesn’t get money from the advertisers.
It’s a pretty nasty idea, isn’t it? The thought that using an ad blocker is somehow unfair to the websites you frequent, somehow cruel and unethical is a rather bitter pill to swallow…but is it true? Are ad blocking extensions really going to kill the Internet if they become widespread? Are we really causing that much damage by browsing in peace and quiet, without the headache-inducing clamor of bumbling, incompetent marketers trying to sell us products we care nothing about?
Yes, but that’s not the whole story. There’s a little bit more to it than marketers would have us believe, you see. The funny thing is, all these websites that moan and groan and wax poetic about how terrible ad blockers are, are neglecting an integral issue- the reason that all these people use ad blockers. More and more, advertisements are getting louder and more distracting, More and more, many of them are using scripts and features which, for lack of better terms, completely spit on privacy.
More and more, advertisers and marketers are treating their users in a way that can only be described as downright abusive. Is it any wonder we’ve had enough? Is it any surprise we tune them out?
Techdirt (which, oddly enough, manages to remain quite well-to-do without forcing advertisements on its users) likens businesses complaining about ad blockers to the RIAA and MPAA complaining about piracy (though with considerably less legislation laundering and unethical business practices, of course). It only hurts them because they can’t be bothered to change their business model. Something is inherently broken about Internet marketing at the current juncture, and until it changes, people are going to keep installing and using ad-blocking extensions. Perhaps if marketers were actually held to some standard, it’d be less of an issue. But as it is, they aren’t, and they don’t seem to understand why that’s problematic.
Essentially, they need to own up to their bloody mistakes. Instead of complaining about people blocking ads, they need to figure out why they’re blocking ads. Until they do that, I’m going to keep happily browsing with my ad blocking extensions installed, thanks.
Image Credits: [i-jr]
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Amen, brother!
Just today, I myself was ranting against the uptick in “pop over” ads, which greet you for first visiting a website with an ad that you have to click past first. Which also, by the way, is usually broken on mobile devices (you know, quickly becoming the #1 way in which someone views the internet), where you have a difficult to impossible time closing the “pop over” to get to the content.
What’s the difference between these and the universally hated and blocked “pop up” ads? Nada. Of course, it was the marketers who invented those also, and pushed them onto unwilling internet users.
So let me see, you want to make it difficult to impossible for me to get to your content, shove an ad in my face, and _also_ want to whine about your lost revenue? Bring on the ad blockers. Anyone know of any for Android???
And in some cases you have to blame the revenue-greedy sites themselves for not polcing their “advertisers”. If I get fed up with the ads involved with a particular site, I leave them feedback that they have lost a visitor due to this and never go back. At some point one would hope that they realize that ad revenue is far less than the potential business or visitors being lost.
A look in the mirror would show that it is the ads and advertisers that are likely to kill the internet; not the adblockers.
If we don’t want to view advertising then get used to paying for visiting websites.
I think the point was, they can show advertising, but do it without being obnoxious and browser/resource heavy, and without interfering with access to the contents. IMHO, PCMech is a good example, which toes up to the line but does not cross it.
I use an ad blocker myself. I wouldn’t be using one if they didn’t make intrusive ads that fly across and around your screen. It’s not like I don’t notice the quiet ads on the side or the top of the page, but I immediately close those pop-ups and fly-out ads because I wouldn’t want to purchase from a company that wants to irritate consumers like me. I do disable the ad blocker on certain sites, actually, sites that don’t allow for the irritating types of ads, and on forum sites that need the ads to help pay for their free service.
The problem is that a small percentage of the advertisers are ruining it for all of the others. We install the ad blockers to prevent those annoying ads, not to block all of them, but the blockers don’t discriminate between the two types. So we end up blocking most or all of the ads.
I doubt that we will ever see this happen, but if there was a code of ethics that could be followed by advertisers, and those advertisers were signed up with a verifying web site, ad blockers could be set to be automatically disabled on sites that follow that code of ethics regarding their advertising (and maybe their privacy policies, etc.).
It may come to that as more people enable ad blocking on their browsers.
Donald
Are ad blockers killing the internet? My answer will be no. I would like to say the sites that show too many irrelevant advertisements are killing the internet. People use ad blockers because they are totally annoyed with those ads. Ad blockers do really harm those people who totally depends on those website ads for money and even don’t show too many ads on their website like this blog it don’t have too many ads so i don’t need ad blocker but still i am using it cause i am too lazy to enable and disable ad blocker again and again so in a way it’s harming your income.
I don’t use ad-blockers, but I do block scripts and such that can be intrusive or dangerous to me and my PC.
If the ads aren’t using scripts and such things that I have to expressly allow, because they can be detrimental to my PC, then they show up. If they are using things like that, then they don’t.
It’s up to the ad supplier whether they show up on my screen or not. Show a panel, fine, I’ll see it. Use animation or script, I won’t see it.
“Changing your business model” doesn’t do a thing about basic human selfishness. You can easily download music and games online but people continue to pirate them anyway because that way they don’t have to pay anything (and spare me the excuses, I’ve heard them all). Then hardcore games vanish from store aisles and are replaced by horse raising simulators and the like, and the clueless pirates don’t realize it’s their own damn fault.
Same with ad blockers, I think. You can support the websites you like by turning adblocker off when you visit them or you can watch them whither away. Your choice.