TechHappens Explainer: Ad Blockers
Love ’em or hate ’em, ads make the (internet) world go round. Ads have democratized the creation of internet content because content creators can get paid for their work. You no longer need to be a giant media company to create Keyboard Cat content, Grumpy Cat content, or any other wonderful cat-related content flooding the internet. Still, as ads have become increasingly prevalent and intrusive, more and more people are resorting to ad blockers to stop ads from ruining their cat-content browsing experiences. This is bad news for big advertising companies like Google that make tons of money from ads. That’s why it was a little shocking to see The Wall Street Journal reporting this month that Google was planning on creating it’s own built-in ad blocker for its Chrome browser. Wait, what?
For those of you not already using an ad blocker, you may be wondering, “what’s all this fuss I keep hearing about ad blockers?” Well friends, here’s the quick and dirty to get your up to speed:
What is an ad blocker?
Pretty much what it promises — an ad blocker blocks the ads from showing up on pages you visit across the internet. Usually, an ad blocker is a browser extension, something your download to add new functionality to your standard, plain vanilla web browser. Some are free, some are paid. Two of the most popular ad blockers on the market right now are AdBlock and the similarly-named yet unrelated Adblock Plus.
Why use an ad blocker?
Lots of reasons:
- Ads can be really annoying and detract from the user experience
- Blocking ads means using less data, which also speeds up how quickly web pages load. A 2016 report by SecretMedia found that ads were responsible for 54% of a page’s load time and 55% of its data bandwidth used. If that sounds like a lot, that’s because it is. The same study found that ads only take up 9% of screen real estate.
- Ads may sometimes contain malware, which might result in your computer getting harmful viruses that could hurt your computer’s performance and compromise your personal information.
- In addition to blocking ads, ad blockers can also stop other parts of a webpage from loading. Among these additions are categories of technology called cookies and scripts, which can track you online and potentially collect information about you. Using an ad blocker to block these too can also help safeguard your personal data.
Why not use an ad blocker?
Fewer reasons, but potentially really important ones:
- Ads are the most common way for a website to make money. These content creators rely on advertising dollars to pay for the costs of running a website, including domain hosting, server space, and salaries, among other things. When you use an ad blocker, you are cutting off that site’s ability to make money from the ads you would have seen. Sites generally don’t make that much money from any given user, but if a whole lot start using an ad blocker, it can have a very serious impact on the site’s ability to continue producing the content people find useful. Some people argue that using an ad blocker is akin to stealing content. As my undergrad economics professor once remarked, all of econ can be boiled down to one word, TANSTAAFL: There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
- Ad blockers also hurt advertising companies like Google and Facebook, the zillion other advertising intermediaries that exist out there, and the advertisers themselves who can’t reach their target audiences. When I say zillion, I mean zillion:
3. Content can sometimes load in ways it wasn’t meant to load, so sometimes pages might look a little funny or misaligned.
I hear you on the ethics but ads are still THE WORST. How do I get an ad blocker?
This is going to depend on which browser you are using. If you don’t know, you can go here to see what browser you’re on right now. Then:
- if you’re on Chrome, go to the Chrome Web Store and search for “ad blocker”
- Safari: Safari Extensions Gallery
- Firefox: Add-ons
- Microsoft Edge: Microsoft Store
- Opera: you’re in luck! There’s one built-in! Or you can search for Opera Extensions.
Let’s get real here for a second: really what you should do is Google “[insert your browser here] ad block” and it’ll take you to where you want to be. Plus you’ll have a much easier time finding the exact step-by-step instructions for how to download and install your own ad blocker. And if you’re not on one of the aforementioned browsers, then either a) you need to update your old Internet Explorer browser right now (or better yet, stop using Microsoft browsers altogether and switch to a better browser like Chrome or Firefox), or b) you’re using something so niche that you shouldn’t be reading this post anyway because you already know about ad blockers.
Why do people make ad blockers?
You’ll have to ask the people who made them, but I speculate that there are three potential reasons:
- Do good for the world: There was a genuine interest in making the browsing experience better for users across the internet. Not only are users having a cleaner browsing experience, but the revenue impact on the advertising industry may help force the major players to police themselves and create standards for acceptable ad behavior that isn’t as terrible as it is now.
- Pride: There’s something to be said for being the one responsible for creating one of the most popular add-ons to the most popular browsers on the web. “This morning I woke up and millions of people used something I created. What did you do today?”
- Dolla dolla billz, y’all: It turns out that when you’re extension is used by tens of millions of people across the planet, that give you pretty significant power to control what users do and do not see. Since 2011, Adblock Plus has had a “whitelist” program that allows certain ad companies to continue displaying their ads to users (users can still take the extra step to opt out of seeing these whitelisted ads if they want). While the company states that ~90% of partners don’t have to pay to be whitelisted, the other 10% are the biggest 10% out there and they’ve got deep pockets. We’re talking Google/Microsoft/Amazon deep. Commenting on the ad blocker business model, Interactive Advertising Bureau (the governing body of all things online advertising) CEO Randall Rothenberg remarked in 2016:
“This is an extortion-based business and hurts publishers.”
Okay, so… why would Google make their own ad blocker? Doesn’t Google make obscene amounts of money from those ads?
Great questions, internet user. At first glance, it does seem strange that the world’s most prominent name in online advertising would build a tool in their own world’s most popular internet browser to block the aforementioned online advertising. So, what’s going on here? Digiday has put together a pretty comprehensive guide on the theories being thrown out there. I won’t go into all of them here but I do want to call out the one reason that seemed most plausible to me:
If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
Internet users are using ad blockers. It is a fact of the internet as we currently know it and there’s no end in sight. Back in August 2016, Facebook rolled out an ad-blocker-blocker update that prevented ad blockers from… blocking ads on Facebook. Just two days later, ad blockers had already created an ad-blocker-blocker-blocker which would continue to block the ads on Facebook. More recently, this month a team of researchers from Stanford and Princeton announced their perceptual ad blocker, a new form of ad blocker that uses computer vision (instead of examining computer code in a webpage) to identify ads. This new method seems to be incredibly effective at doing its job (though for now, in an attempt to avoid jumping into the middle of the ethical debate over ad blocking, it only labels ads instead of blocking them). This is an arms race that is here to stay.
For Google, instead of being wholly dependent on existing ad blockers to control what the internet users are and are not shown, the company might as well get into the game itself and regain some of that control. This way, they won’t need to pay fees to another party and can have more say over what is deemed an acceptable “whitelisted” ad. What if AdBlock Plus suddenly decided that Google would need to pay 10x what they’re paying now or be removed from the set of whitelisted ad providers? Google knows ad blockers will continue to become more and more prominent so they can’t allow themselves to be beholden to another player on something that is so vital to the company’s continued success.
What makes this all the more plausible is that this isn’t the first time that Google has pulled a move that seemed counter to its own business interests. Case in point: DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP), a product owned by Google that allows websites to more easily manage all of the different ads they show on their site. DFP is by far the best-in-class tool for doing what it does (a critical part of the advertising ecosystem called ad serving) and yet Google gives it away for free. What’s more, the tool makes it easier for website to use non-Google ads to compete against Google ads, potentially resulting in Google making less money. What gives? Well, it turns out that giving websites the ability to let these ads compete means that websites don’t have to switch 100% over to a non-Google competitor if they want to start working with new ad partners. It also gives Google a chance to show, with real data, that it can pay better than other competitors.
This only works because Google built a product that users trust and that provides excellent functionality. The same is true for Google’s ad blocking solution. It will only work if people trust that Google isn’t unfairly favoring itself. It will only work if provides real value that is clearly better than competitors. As Google moves ahead, it will have to be extremely careful not to wade into territory that’s problematic for antitrust regulators or for users.
Congratulations, you’re now an ad blocking expert! Do you have other reasons for why people would or would not use an ad blocker? Let me know in a response.
