Advertising is a bloodline of most of the online firms across the globe. As a matter of fact world’s most popular Internet companies, such as Facebook and Google thrive on advertising to back their online business. Ad blocking software has been around since a long period of time. But it is now that online advertisers across the globe are beginning to worry a little.
Now, an online business is facing a huge setback as one out of every five smartphone users is installing an ad blocker to block ads while they are browsing the web from their phones. Imagine what would happen if 420 million people across the globe will block advertisements, want their business come to standstill. Loss of advertising revenue is a huge concern for all the online business entities.
What exactly are ad blockers?
Ad blockers also referred to as content blockers are just regular software programs which stop the ads from being present on the websites. These are basically browser add-ons. You can get such software for all types of browsers such as Chrome, Opera, Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. One of the most sought after ad blocker is AdBlock Plus. This browser plugin is available for a wide variety of browsers. It has been downloaded as well as installed a huge number of times. Off late Apple Inc has fueled a controversy as it has permitted the ad blockers in iOS 9. This is the latest version of its mobile operating system.
Conflicting views regarding ad blockers
There are certain people who favor the ad blocking software saying that it enables people to have superior access to content as they do not have to watch the abrasive ads. The opponents feel otherwise and say that blocking ads infringes the implicit contract which people concede to when they are viewing online content. A huge number of websites on the Internet are present due to online advertising. From small blogs to big websites, huge corporate-owned magazines, all are dependent on online advertising revenues in order to operate. And imagine if adverting revenues are curbed all these will eventually go into oblivion.
There has been a fast spurt in the trend of mobile ad blockers in emerging markets.
Almost 36% of smartphone users in Asia-Pacific region has installed ad-blocking software on their phones, this enables them to get rid of online ads while using the Internet. Now, the benefit of ad blockers is that websites load a lot faster. This helps to conserve data as the ads are not loaded on phones of the users. This is good news for people with limited data plans. Also, when people won’t have to see useless ads, it will save their precious time.
Some people use ad blockers for privacy reasons. Certain advertisements use scripts these are small, self-contained snippets of code which carry out particular functions on a web page which can be put to use to have access to sensitive information of the user.
Most of the advertising platforms make use of behavioral tracking as well as a monitoring technology to, understand user behavior based on their sites. These content blockers are apt for people who do not desire that their online browsing pattern is told to any advertisers or content delivery networks. An add-on such as Ghostery is quite popular among privacy-minded users for this reason.
Conclusion
The global advertising industry is recording a loss of billions of dollars annually because of ad blocking software. This kind of software infringes the net neutrality rule which requires all online data to be treated as equal. As everything comes with its series of advantages and disadvantages, so is the ad blocking software. On one hand, it speeds up fruitful browsing by getting rid of intrusive ads, but on the other side, it is having a negative impact on adverting revenues which is actually the lifeline to the online world. An important point to note here is that ad blockers do not influence the functionality of the app. This is the place where most of the smartphone users spend their time. They just have an impact on browser-based searches. Also, small scale business which hardly sees any big conversions via mobile ads are hardly affected by these ad blockers.
