What Ad Blocking Means to the Web

               iOS 9 was recently, and with it comes a very important feature for some users, ad blocking. For years it’s been easy to block on the Desktop with browsers extensions such as Adblock Plus and the newer uBlock Origin, but this recent update to Apple’s mobile operating system has brought the discussion back to the foreground.

               Ads can be annoying at times, whether it is because they are visually distracting or because they slow down the loading of the content that you want to see. Pop up ads used to be particularly prevalent on the Internet, so browser makers fought back with popup blockers. Advertisers didn’t learn their lesson with these particularly infuriating ads, and now we are at a point where people are trying to block all of the advertisements on the Internet.

               If you put aside the technological battle that will happen between the advertisers and the ad blockers, there are still two very interesting topics that come from this whole ad blocking issue.

               The first of these questions is if we should feel okay about doing this. For those who value security over all other things, it’s easier for the answer to be yes. Ads often come from third party services, whose security you cannot verity. It’s not a hypothetical issue that ads can contain malware, it has happened to large companies like The New York Times. For the rest of us the question is a little bit more interesting. As mentioned previously advertisements can be visually distracting, will slow down pages and increase data usage. In an increasingly mobile centric web this can be a significant issue.

               For as much as most people hate advertisements they still do one very good thing, they allow content to exist that could not otherwise. People tend to not like paying for things when they can avoid it, and advertising makes that possible. When you cut off the revenue source for content creators it makes it much more difficult for them to continue to create their content. Because of this, there are people who are willing to describe people who block ads as parasitic.

               The essence of the argument about the ethics of ad blocking boils down to whether or not a user has an informal contract with websites to render all of the content that they receive. Personally to me, it is no different than fast forwarding or walking out of the room during TV commercials. As a content consumer it isn’t our responsibility to ensure that companies have an effective business model. That being said, there should be ways for consumers to contribute to content creators.

                In November of 2014 Google released a service that is for all intents and purposes a guilt free ad removal service. It works by allowing users to pay a set amount to Google and have them distribute it to sites that use Google’s Adsense in exchange for a reduced number of ads on these sites. This service moves us closer to a patronage model. The popularity of services like Patreon show that people are willing to accept this model. In the next couple years, it’s reasonable to expect a continued shakeup in the way that content is paid for.