Specialists suggest that ad blockers threaten free internet because advertisements are a key component in keeping the internet free.
Internet advertising sustains pretty much every bit of content that users can enjoy on the internet. Still, those ads make the users’ experience on the net a bit less pleasant as they make pages load slower and they track user information in order to determine a profile that the user belongs to. So, ads are both good and bad.
Ad blocking software is used to block the ads and make the user’s experience better. Still, this type of software became a major problem in the online advertising industry.
A lot of internet users opt for ad blocking programs in order to detect ads on websites and block them. This type of software is very popular because users don’t like the idea of their data being collected.
Ad blocking software has been around for years and each day more and more people opt for it. This has generated a debate about the ethics of using the software to block ads.
Some publishers and advertisers strongly believe that blocking ads means violating the unwritten contract that people agree to when using the internet. That means that users are supposed to tolerate some ads in order to have access to the content, because the content is free and the creators of it only get paid because they allow others to place ads on their websites.
Adobe and PageFair published a report estimating that approximately 22 billion dollars will be lost because of ad blocking software this year. This was estimated based on the fact that one out of three internet users has an ad blocking program installed on their device.
AdBlock Plus is a popular program that blocks ads on computers and laptops. The company has developed an Android version of AdBlock Plus and is currently working on one for iOS.
Given the fact that AdBlock Plus will soon be available on all mobile phones, online publishers are starting to worry. Plus, not many mobile users had ad blocking software on their phones before.
Eyeo, the company that developed the AdBlock Plus software, does not seem so concerned about the impact that this type of software could have on the internet. Ben Williams, Eyeo’s spokesman, believes that the advertising industry needs to change in order to create better ads that users will be able to accept.
Photo credits: Altitudedigital.com
