Ad Blockers
Posted: 13 Nov 2015, 21:55
I've mentioned in more than one place that nothing you visit on the Internet is truly free. The bottom line price you pay is the yielding of personal information about your life on the Internet, and in many cases your life in general. By far the people who use this collected information the most are advertisers. They want to get their specific message to a clearly defined target audience. Doing so insures a profit on their investment.
Online advertising is currently a $140 billion industry. That's A LOT of ads in your browser and a lot of personal information collected. It's no wonder people have become put off by ads because they are frequently intrusive, block content, and consume inordinate amounts of your computer resources. The most popular antidote seems to be to install programs specifically designed to block those ads. Most of the ad blocking programs are effective, and that is causing a problem. If enough ads are blocked then the return on investment by the advertiser drops to zero. That investor then stops paying for advertising space, and the website that depends on that income faces extinction.
The dilemma has a solution, or so thinks Wladimir Palant the brains behind Ad Blocker Plus. The article is interesting from an historical perspective as well as from a pure information point of view. It turns out ol' Palant found a way to make money from blocking ads. Then again, he also found out he can be sued. It's an interesting read in general, and my be particularly enlightening to you ad blocker users.
http://www.technologyreview.com/feature ... refers-it/
Online advertising is currently a $140 billion industry. That's A LOT of ads in your browser and a lot of personal information collected. It's no wonder people have become put off by ads because they are frequently intrusive, block content, and consume inordinate amounts of your computer resources. The most popular antidote seems to be to install programs specifically designed to block those ads. Most of the ad blocking programs are effective, and that is causing a problem. If enough ads are blocked then the return on investment by the advertiser drops to zero. That investor then stops paying for advertising space, and the website that depends on that income faces extinction.
The dilemma has a solution, or so thinks Wladimir Palant the brains behind Ad Blocker Plus. The article is interesting from an historical perspective as well as from a pure information point of view. It turns out ol' Palant found a way to make money from blocking ads. Then again, he also found out he can be sued. It's an interesting read in general, and my be particularly enlightening to you ad blocker users.
http://www.technologyreview.com/feature ... refers-it/