I installed Adblock on Firefox back in 2007 as I went on a lot of sites that would maul you with popups and ads that slid out. Invasive ads are incredibly frustrating and detract from the experience of the website, so it made sense for me to do so. However, as the amount of people reading online instead of through physical media increased, the annoying ads no longer were needed. Regular ads like ones you'd find in the newspaper However, my ad blocker stayed on. I used it to give ad revenue to sites I supported and still read the content of sites I did not. Others go an extra step and use sites like archive.today to not even give the site the pageview. Are these moves strictly to show disdain for a site or are they actually stealing from site owners' profits?
According to Ken Fisher, founder of Ars Technica, Adblockers are taking away 40% of their audience for ads and bite into their profits severely. [1] He states that, when ads are blocked that much, they're forced to run more questionable ads, whether of topic or of invasiveness. It's self-fulfilling: people block ads because of content or method, so ads get more questionable since they pay more and more people block ads. Fisher states that, instead of going to sites and ad-blocking them, either enable ads on the site, pay for a service the site provides, or simply don't go. To him "it's a lot more annoying and frustrating to have to cut staff and cut benefits because a huge portion of readers block ads."
However, that's not exactly true. While Adblock definitely takes away ad views, it would have brought so many sites out of business by now. It's not as if Adblock is a new technology; Adblock Plus is reaching almost 8 years old at this point. Additionally, ABP has accepted a whitelist of certain ads if they are determined to be inoffensive. [2] Some have the view that, although Adblock is a problem, sites should not be trying to focus on just standard advertisements to pursue revenue. Since Adblock is so prominent, "it’s impact might be surprisingly large, but the fact it is having an impact should be far from surprising." [3] The common solution around the issue of Adblock is to find other monetization options than advertising. For example, the New York Times moved to a "metered" solution where visitors are given 10 articles for free before being asked to pay for a subscription. This result not only blew away their financial expectations but it actually increased their number of physical papers sold. [4]
After observing the viewpoints on both side, I actually decided to uninstall ADP on my Chrome. I don't believe it's theft as ads are more supplemental income than anything else. Sites that rely on just ads are just looking for an audience for "free" content. They either have other ways to monetize that audience or they're going down eventually. Although I still believe in not supporting certain sites, I do agree that it would be better entirely to not visit them. It would be like if I disagreed with Chick Fil A's stance on gay marriage but I tried to scrounge for coupons to get their chicken for free. I'm taking way too many steps to avoid helping the business and it would be better if I discouraged one business by going to a competitor. I stop going and they stop getting my page clicks and my ad views. Another site gets them instead. The goal should not be ending one site but supporting the good ones. So I'll turn off ADP and visit those sites instead.
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