Reforming Digital Ads

I don’t remember exactly when I decided to install my adblocker, but it was probably due to frustration with certain websites, and the intrusive ways that ads were presented to me. Ever want to download something and find yourself stuck with 10 different “download” buttons? You find yourself in a “Where’s Waldo” puzzle trying to find the correct download button, and eventually click a few of the wrong buttons. All you want to do is download a file, but instead you’ve probably seen a Game of War ad, and maybe some redirect to Fanduel or Draft Kings. It’s pretty annoying, and it becomes pretty clear why adblockers have become popular over the past couple years.

Some websites have certainly abused using ads as revenue, and have gone kind of crazy with the amount of ads being shown. Look at Forbes, it has basically become a giant website devoted to showing ads. You can’t go anywhere without viewing an ad. And on mobile, I end up accidentally clicking more ads than actual content (not to mention how slow the website loads due to all of these ads). If one website made me want to use an adblocker, this one would be it.

Today, a lot of people will consider an ad on a website like they do a virus on their computer. They don’t like that its there, they don’t appreciate it taking up precious screen real estate, and they install different programs to remove these ads from different websites. There’s a difference between ads and viruses however, and that is that not all ads are malicious. In fact, some digital ads are seamlessly integrated into a webpage or mobile app, and sometimes they have great suggestions for things that I actually care about (as opposed to finding 7 hot singles in my area, or telling me I won another free iPad). The problem with adblockers is that they don’t have a filter for discriminating between the intrusive ads, and the well behaved non-intrusive ads. And unfortunately, these non-intrusive ads are typically on websites of small content providers, who live and die by their ad revenue. When talking to people about adblockers, I commonly hear the same reason why people torrent music: “Who cares if I block the ads, it’s not like they need any more money.” And while this may be true for the media giants, a lot of smaller content websites truly need the money.

You can’t blame people for using an adblocker though. I don’t want to see an intrusive ad as much as the next guy, but I also don’t want to rob smaller websites of the much needed ad revenue without giving them a chance to show me what their website looks like without ads. Recently, Adblock-Plus (not affiliated with Adblock) tried to solve the problem I just described. They will allow certain ads to be shown as long as the ad conforms to their guidelines. You can read more about their criteria here. I think that this is a step in the right direction. My only gripe is that Adblock Plus receives money in return of being whitelisted. But hey, we all have to make money somehow.

Moving forward, I hope that an acceptable ads program becomes more widely accepted. However, exchanging money for being whitelisted isn’t the best way to go about this, mainly because it will eventually become a corrupt system. In an ideal world, the adblockers would promote the acceptable ads program so it becomes mainstream for no monetary gain. It would pressure different content providers to switch to the nonintrusive ads that we all love, and remove the intrusive ads that ruin the user’s experience. Everyone would benefit in this scenario. The user would benefit by no longer having to deal with the intrusive, annoying ads that we are all familiar with. And the content provider would benefit from more ad revenue. But to get this program moving in full force, we would have to put monetary gains aside for awhile to build a better system.