Blocking Ads: The dark side of ad blocking and its consequences

As Internet continues to evolve from just a concept more than a decade ago to it being called a network of networks, it has come a long way. Many years ago, companies used to be confined to a small geographical area for selling their products and when Internet came into picture, companies found that just by having a website, they could start selling their products on a global basis, but that’s a different story.

As of today there are over a 60 million (or many more) domains registered on Internet that are involved with plenty and variety of things. Some sell software, some offer services. Then there are those who offer free software and services, and are quite popular because of what they offer. But everything can not be free on Internet and that’s where advertisement comes into picture. Many companies want to reach audience from around the world and for them advertisement on Internet is the cheapest, fastest and the best way to accomplish this.

But what if you start blocking all the ads from showing up by using either some sort of ad blocking software or by other means? This will disturb the way Internet works today. Example - If Google offers you free search service, that’s because there are hundreds of companies using their AdWords program, spending enormous amount of money towards advertisement. Google indirectly makes money from various other services they offer and that powers the infrastructure and man power to keep their search engine running. Would you otherwise like to pay $1 or $0.1 for every search query? I don’t think so! I myself search ~300 to 1000 times a month on Google and if I were to pay for every time I search, I won’t even think about it. Would you?

Let me now draw you attention to the real problem which is the main objective of writing this post. The Adblocking plugins that many of us have been using in our browsers to block advertisement from showing up while we browse web sites, is directly contributing towards negatively impacting the advertisement model on the Internet.

If you are a publisher who’ll not like it if people block all the ads on your site when they visit it, you must also not block ads when you visit their websites.

There are some websites that have started to block Firefox browser because of the Adblock Plus plugin it supports. Last, read this anti-firefox post from John Andrew’s blog.

Would you still consider blocking ads in your browser or continue blocking them? Please share your thoughts by post them in the comments section below.