Life

Ad Blockers are killing innovation

Ugh, advertisements! I know, none of us like them on a website that we visit. Know what we dislike more? Having to pay anytime we visit a website.

Love ’em or hate ’em, online advertisements are how many content providers keep their websites running and make a living providing you the content and services that you love to use. Viewing advertisements is essentially the cost of keeping the internet running. That’s why companies like Google and Facebook have made so much money selling advertisements.

Since people don’t like advertisements the Ad Blocker was created. A tool that you run on your computer that looks for advertisement code in websites and prevents them from showing on the website. Sounds like a great tool for people that don’t like advertisements, but there’s a hidden cost associated with them; they are killing innovation in the advertising space!

According to Statista, 30% of U.S. internet users are using an ad blocker on their connected devices. This means that 1/3 users aren’t “paying” to use the internet, which I believe has led content owners to get more and more annoying with their ad placements, video ads, pop-ups, and all of the other annoying ads that you see. You’ll even see many websites that have more ad content than they do actual content. This leads to more aggressive ad blockers…and the cycle keeps going.

As a content owner, I can tell you that we don’t like placing ads. We also think they are annoying for the most part, so we look for solutions, like JSECoin, which allow us to monetize our content while minimizing the number of ads that we show. The problem is that many ad blockers will block any code that it thinks is an ad, whether it’s really an ad or not.

Yes, JSECoin does do cryptocurrency mining in the browser, but it’s completely transparent and provides an opt-out before the script starts. What ad lets you opt out of seeing it?

While ad blockers serve a purpose, they need to be very careful that they’re not driving the one thing that they are trying to prevent…more reliance on advertisements.