The threat and delight of blocking web advertisements.

The internet has grown from its once humble origins of being a tool for academics and governments to transmit information into one of the most ubiquitous pieces of technology ever. At one point, the internet was a small community of only a few hundred to thousands of people. Now, however, the internet is more often a place of business than it is anything else. Even if you're not going to a page or site and spending money, there is likely someone making money off of your visit. Web advertisements have become commonplace in today's web pages, for better or for worse.

Web advertisements work in a couple of ways. You can have static images on the side of a page. You could have a banner ad running at the top and/or bottom portion of the site. Many sites will change the background of the web page to be an advertisement. Some sites will divert you to a page that is entirely an advertisement. You need to sit at that page for a few seconds before it lets you go to the content you wanted. Video based advertisements are often considered the worst offenders of all. Video sites such as Youtube will insert a video advertisement before the video you're trying to watch. Sometimes they can be skipped after a few seconds, but often they can not, and you're forced to wait through a thirty second advertisement before you can watch a fifteen second clip of a cat falling off of a building. Some sites with articles are now adding advertisements to their lists of articles so it looks like an advertisement is actual content.

These advertisements generate revenue in different ways. Sometimes they work on the basis of click-throughs. Every time somebody clicks the advertisement, it gets counted. After a period of time (it could be weekly, monthly, daily) the click-throughs are totaled and a payout is made based on the total. Ads paid on a click-through model often attempt to look like something else. You could go to download a piece of software and think the download link is the big, green, flashing button that says “DOWNLOAD NOW!”, when the download link is actually a small bit of blue text down below it. These ads are deceptive and especially annoying to deal with. Other ads might be monetized based on actual or expected viewers, similar to television ads. If a company regularly gets a certain amount of views to their front page, they would charge a certain rate for the advertisement spot. It wouldn't matter how many people click the advertisement, but they would see it anyways.

The combination of the prevalence and annoyance of advertisements on web pages has led to the development of software designed specifically to block them. The most prolific of these softwares are Adblock and Adblock Plus (which come from two separate companies). These are web browser add-ons that eliminate damn near all of the advertisements that pages display. This often makes browsing sites much cleaner and easier, in addition to less time spent waiting for some content. End users like these add-ons because it simplifies the pages and gives them just what they want to see without the extra fluff that the advertisements provide. The owners of web sites don't like them as much, as it can take away from the revenue stream. If a business is just a web site, then the advertisements may be a large percent of their income.

Sites go about dealing with ad blocking in a number of different ways. The worst way that I've seen ad blocking dealt with is by refusing to display the content or page while the advertisements are blocked. This is a very direct way of dealing with the issue, but is also very heavy handed and pushy. I'd be likely to just close the page and forget about what I was going to do there. Another very direct way, but nowhere near as pushy, is to display images in the advertisement spaces. Some sites put images where the advertisements would go saying things like “Hey, we see you're using blocking our ads.” This raises the issue of blocking the advertisements to the user, but doesn't negatively impact them. Sometimes they'll even request that people not use the ad blockers with the space.

Some sites are looking into other methods of dealing with advertisement averse users. Some sites now offer paid subscriptions that offer additional on-site benefits, often including not showing advertisements. Major gaming blog Destructoid, along with its partner blogs, recently introduced their paid membership, known as Huge. Paid members get an altered site layout that is wider than normal since it doesn't need to deal with the advertisement space. Reddit has been experimenting with Reddit Gold for some months now, offering a reddit free of ads with the subscription. Both of these sites are still completely usable with the blockers on, and the subscriptions don't cost much per month (just $3 a piece or $30 for a year).

I think that the paid membership with additional benefits is the best route to go. It's not particularly pushy or rude, and it doesn't make the sites any worse for those without the membership. Quite often, simply asking someone to turn of the blockers can be successful if the site doesn't have obnoxious advertisements anyways.