Ad Blocking: A Market or a Moral Issue?
As a followup to his NY Times column on Adblock Plus, Noam Cohen ponders the morality of blocking ads. But many of his commenters suggest that this is not a moral or ethical issue: it is an economic one. If enough people choose to block ads, ad-supported websites will either go out of business or choose alternative business models.
This is relevant to web workers because we rely so heavily on free web content — and because many of us earn income directly or indirectly from online advertising. If the advertising model turns out to be unworkable given users’ penchant to turn off ads, we might all be the poorer for it.
On the other hand, if so many people find ads annoying rather than helpful, maybe we won’t be worse off with less advertising and different online business models. More direct payment mechanisms like subscription fees or per-article micropayments might become common. And those who make their work freely available anyway on the theory that attention is a form of currency will continue to make it freely available.
Many people using ad blockers only do so to avoid the most abusive ads: animations that assault your eyes, popups that invade your desktop, videos that play loudly without your consent, and trickery that lures you, such as an ad disguised as a dialog box. You could imagine an ad blocking browser extension that allowed only ads that met certain guidelines for nonabuse (for example, only unobtrusive text links or small, nonanimated graphics). Such an extension could be used by those who are not opposed to ads generally, only opposed to ads that don’t behave well.
What do you think: is ad blocking a market or a moral issue? And do you do it?
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Website advertisements have gotten a lot less intrusive. I can remember when you could go to just about any website and pop-up ads (in some cases for adult-only products) would jump out at you. Many computer users resorted to ad blocking software to protect themselves and their families.
I don’t use ad-blocking, but I also never read and/or click on advertisements.
People are having the same discussions about DVRs. Now that we have the ability to skip commercials, most of us with DVRs can’t watch TV any other way.
So I guess what’s the difference between ignoring an ad and blocking it. If you’re the type of person who’s going to use ad-blocking, then you are probably not the type of person who’s going to be clicking on ads anyway.
Jeff: there are some ads that are purchased on a cost-per-impression (CPM) basis as a way of exposing readers to a brand. Those of us running ad blocking software don’t see those ads — and advertisers are paying for the impressions anyway.
Good point that this has come up before with DVRs.
I forgot about impressions. Maybe the way web based advertising is sold needs to be changed.
In any case, It’s a pretty compelling argument that I really hadn’t thought of before.
Anyway, the cost-per-click model as well has serious problems too (click fraud!) And so far the use of ad blocking hasn’t spread widely. So maybe this is only a theoretical problem.
I am optimistic about the market’s ability to sort it out. Micropayments and/or subscriptions aren’t necessarily a bad thing, especially given so many people give away their content just for attention not for advertising revenue.
The real interesting thing about the folks who are so vocal about ad blocking being okay is that if you asked them if they’d pay a subscription to view websites, they’d refuse.
The very people who scream the loudest about this are either in denial or just ignorant about the flip side of no advertisements…which is a for-pay model. They very “free internet” that they think should exist and be ad-free would quickly turn in to a for-pay internet in which they can’t access many of the sites they love.
Anne/Jeff -
In most cases advertisers paying on a CPM basis actually wouldn’t get charged for the “blocked” ads, because the browser’s decision to block the ad is made before any requests are passed along to remote servers. With Firefox’s AdBlock Plus extension (as with the old fashioned approach of adding ad servers to one’s hosts file with a 127.0.0.1 IP address) any content requests that would go to blocked sources are just discarded, so from the ad servers’ perspective it’s functionally the same as the site getting one less visit.
In some ways this is actually better for CPM advertisers, as they’re not paying for ads that would be displayed for the least interested audience…I’m sure everyone reading this remembers the “468×60 blind spot syndrome” from back in the day, when advertisers were paying for those top/center banners that everyone had already mentally filtered out.
The question of whether it’s ethical to browse ad supported sites without viewing the associated ads certainly still stands, but I don’t believe that fairness to advertisers is a significant factor there.
W.B.: thanks for the clarification, I didn’t realize that.
Josh: I use AdBlock Plus myself, and I’m not a huge opponent of ads (I work for an ad-supported network, after all). However, I had some problems with popunders and video ads that made my laptop’s fan spin up noisily and the easiest thing to do was block all ads — which has made my browsing much more pleasant, incidentally!
Don’t know that I’m representative of ad blocking people, but I think part of it is just a response to very annoying ads not a dogmatic opposition to the advertising model itself.
I don’t have a problem with unobtrusive ads. The problem I have is with ads that hold up a page from loading. When I look down at the status bar and see some ad network’s URL “waiting”, that’s when I get annoyed. And that’s why I just recently installed ABP.