Member Article

Is It Always Wrong To Block Ads?

The online publishing industry has a problem. Almost every major and most small publishing ventures are funded by advertising. They provide content that attracts the attention of web users and in return for that content, a portion of their attention is directed to advertising.

It’s a hundred billion dollar industry, but advertising as a revenue model may be on the way out.

Ad blockers have been around almost since the beginning of the web, but they had always been used by a small minority of users: those who were most technically aware and capable.

That’s changing. In 2014, a quarter of US users blocked ads. In Europe, ad blockers are even more popular: 30 percent of French users and 40 percent of German users block ads. It’s a near certainty that those numbers are only going to go up.

As a writer of online content, that makes me nervous. Directly or indirectly, advertising pays my bills. Unlike some creative professionals, I’m a strong believer that everyone has the right to control what they download in their browsers. If they want to block ads, that’s their right. If I felt otherwise, I couldn’t do anything about it anyway.

Some of my fellow writers and editors get — perhaps understandably — frustrated about ad blocking:

‘It comes up a lot in conversation, especially online. “Oh yes, I can’t imagine viewing the Web without the ads blocked. I accidentally switched my adblocker off yesterday and it was HORRIBLE.” No, it really wasn’t – it was perfectly fine, you’re just being a snob. The Web works well for me with the ads displayed. It’s a point of principle – helping publishers earn money is something I want to do and feel we all should do if we consume their work.’

It’s not snobby to want a good user experience. It’s not snobby to want to avoid the eye-jangling, attention-fatiguing bombardment of junk that many publishers litter their pages with. And it’s not snobby to protect yourself from the malware that frequently finds its way onto advertising networks.

When you read content on the web, there is an implied agreement to an exchange of value. I value your attention, you value my content; we make an exchange and I sell some of your attention to an advertiser. It’s an agreement that relies on honesty and fair dealing on both sides.

The problem comes when I try to hijack attention that is worth more to you than the content I’m offering. We implicitly agree on an equal exchange. If I bombard you with pop-ups and pop-unders, expanding autoplay video ads, and banner ads that take up 80 percent of the page, then it is I who has broken the agreement. Obnoxious advertising is like agreeing to sell you something for a dollar and trying to sneak an extra fifty cents out of your pocket while aren’t looking.

The success of the advertising industry depends on users who trust publishers and advertisers to do the right thing. And there are plenty of responsible advertisers out there: publishers who are happy with a fair exchange of eyeballs for content. I think that’s the crux of the ethics of ad blocking.

Blocking obnoxious, unfair, and abusive advertising is ethical. Blocking reasonable, fair, and respectful advertising is wrong, and eventually, it will destroy the online publishing economy. So, I encourage everyone who uses ad blockers to do so on a site by site basis. Assess the advertising on each site, and whitelist those sites whose content you think is worth the price of your attention.

About Matthew Davis—Matthew works as an inbound marketer and blogger for Future Hosting, a leading provider of VPS hosting. Follow Future Hosting on Twitter at @fhsales, Like them on Facebook and check out their tech/hosting blog,http://www.futurehosting.com/blog.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Matthew Davis .