# Adblocking

The web is becoming more and more greedy and dangerous. Where is the line drawn? Advertisers want to advertise their products on many websites and cybercriminals want to spread malicious content through advertising. I believe taking this into consideration users should be able to easily block ads on websites to prevent unwanted spamming on websites containing numerous advertisements and to prevent the possibility of fake ads redirecting you to sites set up with malicious content.

Relating to websites that contain numerous ads Jason Kint writes, “Online advertising is trusted less than any other form of advertising. When we see examples like the St. Louis Post Dispatch’s approach to online advertising, we shouldn’t be wondering why consumers are flocking to ad blockers in droves”. It is understood that ads bring in revenue for websites and having more of them can increase revenue depending on how many users see, click on the ad, and/or buy a product. Ads add incentives for websites to advertise their own website and to get advertisements on their website as well.

An example of where fake ads can be used to redirect users to sites designed to harm your computer is, “...the ad previously took users to a Dropbox URL to serve malware, but was soon "replaced with an even more malicious one" which employed a fake replica website 'gilimp.org' to serve malware.”

Overall; after examining why ads need to be allowed and why they need to be allowed to be blocked by ad blockers it can be concluded that users have a choice in today’s current age of viewing the web. If users use adblockers they may not see retargeted ads that they may be interested in but at the same time, they may also be running a risk of fake ads with links to websites containing malicious content or ads that they are not interested in appearing. Even though many of the ads will be blocked and currently users have easy ways to block ads with ad blockers most people prefer not to, don’t know what ad blockers are, and/or want to see the advertisements these three factors still keep online advertising very relevant and prominent in thousands of websites and allow for free content and services to be continued to be offered.

I am a sports fan and the images below I chose were from Yahoo Sports. Yahoo Sports keeps me up to date on all different sports and teams. They also have a fair amount of ads on their website.

Before

After


After seeing this big difference I am going to plan on keeping the adblocker I just added to Chrome which when enabled blocks ads when I view the web on Chrome.