Why block Ads

According to a report from PageFair and Adobe earlier this year, there were, on average, 12 million monthly active users of ad-blockers in the UK in the second quarter. Passages that discuss about ad-blocker and anti-ad-blocker have been existed for a long time. So the question is why people create Adblock and why users use them?

What is Ad Block?

Ad block software (e.g. filters, Ad block plunge in, Ad block App) have been existed for a long time. But it didn't come into the public awareness until Ad block developed a version compatible with Google Chrome, the majority browser, and became powerful to block almost all ads on all websites.

The creator of Ad block, Michael Gundlach, was inspired by the ad block plunge-in of Firefox browser. When he found no such plunge-in on Google Chrome, he developed Ad block to fit in different kinds of browsers.

We all know that Google Chrome is the browser with most users in global wide and Ad blocking was not taken into serious consideration until it dramatically expanded after launching on Google Chrome.

Later, Ad block and Ad block plus were combined. Ad block plus was created by Wladimir Palant and organized by Eyeo. Eyeo is an organization that supposes to establish a better Internet by banning bad ads, protecting privacy, insuring security and supporting open source programmers.

How Ad block works

It has filters which is a list of blocking rules including what kind of forms and what kind of sources would be blocked. It filters the signals from the service provider and may further filter cookie tracking data from your computers, which means Ads will not reach unique users(though it has been sent out from the server) and could no more collect user behavior.

How it earns

Generally, Eyeo has two parts of income (From About ABP). But it is now more like non-profit organization that strive to maintain common expense.

First, donation from users. According to Its crowdfunding campaign hit over $47,000 with 24 days to go, which shows great potential of its 2 million users. But Michael said that less than 0.1% of users would donate actively. I assumed that lack of eye-catching button of donation is one main reason for low donation rate.

Second, a few very large entities who take part in the Acceptable Ads initiative compensate Eyeo for its service. Eyeo's service is provided free of charge to all other participants (roughly 90%).

Eyeo claims a criteria for not annoying advertising and declares that all paid and unpaid participants should stick to the criteria. Ad block has an official filter lists which are claimed to be concluded by users but users could change the setting by themselves, like blocking or unblocking a specific website. Paid corporate would be added to whitelist obeying the criteria but users could still report their annoying ads or move them to blacklist individually.

The future of Adblock

The main reason of the appearance of Ad block is the overwhelming online ads which are not relevant and intrusive of content. Actually, all key participants of the Internet are striving to optimize the situation in different ways. Ad block plunge-in is only one way developed by users to offend intrusive Ads.

Governments announce laws to regulate how advertisers deliver ads. Advertising industry prefer to set up industry regulation, like a series of interactive advertising guidelines published by IAB. Internet platforms are also starting to provide add-on service to help users block Ads, such as YouTube Red and Contributor of Google. Most websites displaying ads offer opt-in and opt out use of cookies and other tracking devices.

Though advertisement companies and Internet companies have more resources to develop their "Ad block" Strategies. Grass-root Ad block plunge-in still has promising future for free of charge and trust from users.

#newmedia #Adblock #advertising #technology