Barry Collins finds that ad blockers aren’t as altruistic as they first appear
Until about a year ago, I never liked the idea of ad blockers. The fairies don’t put words on websites while you’re sleeping; most of them are put there by real journalists being paid real money by real publishers, and if you need to view a banner ad or even close a pop-up in lieu of payment for the information you’re getting, so be it. That’s your side of the unwritten deal.
Then advertisers got silly. Really silly. Auto-playing video ads with the volume cranked to 11 became the norm. You’d be sitting at your desk when suddenly a tab you hadn’t touched for two minutes would erupt into life, blasting your eardrums with advertising jingles as you flapped about in a panic, trying to find the offending tab to shut it down. You couldn’t boycott the sites that were doing it, because they were all doing it: the only way to keep the peace was to (reluctantly, in my case) install an ad blocker.
The king of the blockers is undoubtedly Adblock Plus (adblockplus.org) – a no-fuss browser add-on that’s so effective it claims to have 50 million active users. In fact, it’s so good at blocking the really irritating stuff that you probably haven’t even noticed some of the adverts that do slip through: those ads at the top of your search results and the mysteriously personalised ads down the side.
Click the Adblock Plus icon in your browser, delve into the settings and you’ll note one of the pre-ticked options is to “allow some non-intrusive advertising”. That option, the little Read More link next to it explains, “allows some of the advertising not considered annoying to be viewed. By doing this you support websites that rely on advertising but choose to do it in a non-intrusive way”.
What Adblock Plus omits to tell you, however, is that it also benefits Adblock Plus. In a good piece of journalism, albeit one that’s now behind a paywall (meaning it’s not plagued by ads), the Financial Times discovered that companies such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon are paying Adblock Plus’s developers substantial sums of money to wave their ads through (bit.ly/ft365). Adblock Plus isn’t so much protection from ads as a protection racket, only allowing ads from big companies if they come to an undisclosed financial agreement.
True, those ads still have to meet strict criteria to pass through the filters – auto-running videos are still barred, no matter how big your cheque book – but Adblock Plus’s system isn’t truly designed to give companies an “incentive to produce better ads”, as its FAQ claims. In fact, it’s designed to give advertisers an incentive to pay Adblock Plus, and we web users are the unwitting incentive.
Adblock Plus’s developer, Eyeo, claims it needs to charge the big firms because it “requires significant effort on our side and this task cannot be completely taken over by volunteers”. Given that the company employs 36 staff and is currently hiring, it seems that taking the moral high ground is a pretty lucrative business.
I didn’t like ad blockers before I installed them, but I like them a whole lot less now.