# Ad blocking
We all hate those annoying pop-ups that we get when shopping for clothes or having to wait 5 seconds before watching a YouTube video. But I think most of us would dislike it even more if we had to pay a fee to shop on these websites or watch videos on YouTube. Ads are used to try to intrigue a user into buying a product, and targeted ads may be an even more effective method of doing this. But at what point is the marketing tactic crossing the line?

A survey conducted by the University of Pennsylvania, states that 66% of adult Americans don’t want marketers to tailor ads to their interests (Marti, 2017). l I know many people I know don’t like that their phone knows their top choice on their Christmas wish list. Some even think that their devices may be listening to them and/or spying on them. So why do we still have them?

According to Bilton, “Behavioral advertising may be vital to the current makeup of the web.” (Marti, 2017). Advertisers don’t need to buy expensive ads on big websites, instead, they can advertise things catered to a user on any website that they go on, making it a lot cheaper for the advertiser since they can advertise on websites that are smaller that don’t cost as much money. This is great for advertisers, as they can get cheap advertisements to users at a more efficient rate. But this also led to their downfall through the uprise of ad blocking.


*Figure 1: correlation between "how to block ads" awareness and retargeting*

To me, targeting malicious ads toward people is 100% crossing the line. Recently, a Google ad from GIMP.org would pop up when searching for “gimp” and would be the first search result to come up because of a Google advertisement (Sharma, 2022). It totally looked legit, but it was malware. To me, this is where targeted ads cross the ethical line. Advertisers should not be able to use advertisements to hurt people, and I think in this circumstance the ad was being used for malicious purposes.

These are some websites that I used with and without an adblocker. The first one is [Youtube](https://www.youtube.com), and the second one is a [CNN](https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/14/politics/katie-hobbs-arizona-governors-race/index.html) article

| |Without an ad blocker |With an ad blocker |
| -------- | -------- | -------- |
| 1 ||
| 2 | | 

I had ads on the CNN article even with an ad blocker. Before today, I would have been confused as I had my ad blocker on so there shouldn’t be any ads. But after reading the article by Kastrenakes, I am not surprised as the article states, 'allow blogs and other website operators to pick out so-called “acceptable” ads and place them on their pages’. I am not completely sure if this is why my CNN article has ads on it, but it can definitely be possible as I am using [AdBlock ](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adblock-%E2%80%94-best-ad-blocker/gighmmpiobklfepjocnamgkkbiglidom) as my ad blocker.