I was an Adblock Plus user for as long as I can remember. But Adblock comes at a price, the sites that provide content can’t do it for free.
It’s true that Adblock made the web a much simpler place with far less clutter, no shouting flashing banners and annoying giant yellow bouncing things. For a long time I thought I was an ethical ad blocker because I disabled on sites that I frequented and liked, but otherwise I kept the default setting as block all ads for all other sites. But I was still visiting those other sites when I would Google something and land somewhere. Some of those sites provided me with valuable information, but I wasn’t doing my part to help them stay in existence.
Finally I decided to just disable it all together. The result is that it’s not really as bad as I thought it would be. The advertisers have toned down their ads in the past few years and are mostly reasonable now. Ad targeting has gotten a lot better as well, so the ads I see are related to other content I’ve looked at or searches I’ve done. The advertisers really have been trying.
There are still some sites that are abusive with popups and over-advertising that I would like to block. For example my local newspaper (and probably many others) is so ad laden that they’re barely readable. I pay them every month for a Kindle subscription so they don’t have to deliver a physical paper to me but they still get some money from me. I’d be happy to deal with some ads but they are at a ridiculous level. This brings me to a fix for ad blockers, make the default setting disabled for everywhere and then enable blocking only on sites that cause problems.
This way users can still ad block sites that are troublesome, but don’t automatically block everything. Adblock Plus instituted a default allow for what they consider acceptable ads but they have such a narrow definition that it’s almost useless.
Even the Adblock Plus developer admits that as their usage grows, running small websites will become unsustainable. In talking about their whitelisting for acceptable ads he says:
Without this feature we run the danger that increasing Adblock Plus usage will make small websites unsustainable.
But the whitelisting of “acceptable” ads that he’s talking about doesn’t really help small sites. A small site is most likely getting their ads from Google AdSense. There is no option in AdSense to only show what Adblock Plus considers acceptable ads and small sites don’t have the ability or cachet to sell ads to companies directly. Instead the whitelisting is helping the biggest sites, like Reddit.
It’s time for a new ad blocker that by default doesn’t block any ads. I know this sounds like it’s of limited value to the end user, but it allows those users who want to support the sites they visit to do so but still maintain the ability to block sites that abuse ads.
Image: Wikimedia Commons.
