Adblockers

I` m a heavy user of Youtube, because of the infinite entertaining content that it offers. Though the one thing that bugs me is the long unskippable ads that I have to wait and sit through. I understand that this is what allows these content creators to provide us free entertainment, but can not stand the annoyance these cause. This fact goes for any other website and is an inevitable fact that we are exposed to all kinds of ads on all kinds of websites daily. To counteract this issue, there are tools called “adblockers” that makes it so ads do not appear on the websites you browse. This is something very common nowadays and I am sure that a good handful of the IST students here at Penn State are currently using this. Though such tools are tempting and would take a large burden off of our internet use, the increase in popularity of these ad blockers is causing a detrimental effect on website operators. 

 

Stephen Shankland writes an article on the Cnet news on how these adblockers are mobile devices as well as computers. At this point, it is estimated to be that 15 to 30 percent of internet trafficking is of people using adblockers. After the widespread of smartphones, many of our daily internet browsings moved towards our mobile devices in that is much easier to do so. Therefore as more and more people start to block advertisements on their mobile devices, it is all up to time for this “30%” to increase to a “40”, “50” and further up. The significance of this fact lies in the fact that there are content providers on the internet that relies on this to continue their operation. Ads do not only annoy us by wasting our time and effort, but they drain the battery and also use up extra data. Therefore, it is completely natural for people to want to use these adblockers disregarding the issue it is causing.

 

Reading this article made me think about the situation before the existence of the internet. As of now, the internet has become such a common field for media and I would say there are no better places for industries to advertise on. Though before we had the internet, these ads that we now see on websites were in newspapers, posters, magazines, television and out in the streets which were the source of popular media back then. Though we still do have advertisements in such forms, industries have noticed that the internet is a much better platform to spread information on. It would be impossible for there to be ways to block our selves from being in contact with these types of advertisements. I feel that the internet has both brought in and blocked out new possibilities and old norms.

source: https://www.cnet.com/news/ad-blocking-takes-off-on-mobile-phones-a-challenge-for-publishers/

2 thoughts on “Adblockers

  1. I do believe that the internet is a great place to advertise especially compared to old methods. However, if I could choose to never see an ad before a youtube video again or have a pop up at the bottom, I would. 98% of the time I’m never interested in the ad at all, and I know many people can relate to this. Ads that aren’t allowed to be skipped are absolutely the worst as well. So, I think if a few users a paying for services to block ads that they wouldn’t even be interested in, this won’t be making a significant impact for those companies. This is especially due to the fact that there’s a chance we will see that ad on another form of social media anyways.

  2. I also get very annoyed with the abundance of ads I see on a daily basis. Typically, when I think of adblockers, I think of having to pay for no ads. Some apps will become free of ads, if you pay so much money.

Leave a Reply