## Online ads & blockers
#### Reading Response

If advertisements were as easy to block as people online, then this conversation wouldn’t even be happening. Just like the people we talk to virtually, online advertisements should be easily blocked – who wants to be bombarded by pop ups? The reality is that people use ad blockers to prevent invasion of privacy. But, who knows what that looks like in this day and age since most online users can’t and haven’t experienced it with the use of softwares on our computers and phones. What’s even worse is that ad blockers may not even be giving us the privacy we think we have. Sven Taylor says that “advertising networks frequently install trackers on your device” so that they can collect your personalized data to target ads toward you – and they keep this information in a database of your online activities (2020). This is crazy to perceive, but websites have to make an income somehow I suppose.

People may argue that web ads are a source of income for website providers/creators, but “the more targetable that an ad medium is, the less it’s worth,” (Marti, 2017). The websites that allow free content, have other resources than advertising to make money and enable free content as well. There’s crowdfunding, data monetization with cookies, subscriptions, etc. Now I don’t believe online advertisements should be removed, but regulated and not involuntarily enforced and rushed onto our screens. The Acceptable Ads program is something worth entertaining according to society; if you don’t mind the remaining lack of privacy that, according to their website, they use to make “interest-based advertising” (Taylor, 2020).

Now for applications like YouTube that have their creators make money off of advertisements, I say leave them. There’s a difference between seeing an advertisement next to an article while trying to do research, versus entertaining yourself with “GRWM” or mukbang videos. I enjoy supporting my favorite youtubers by watching ads or sponsorships…which means I should support the creators of free content websites by not blocking ads. It’s a polarizing topic.

#### Ad blockers
I used the website Coolmath games; notorious for showing ads all over the website. Here is what the website looked like before I addd the adblocking Chrome Extension.

(The first image is not appearing due to it being over 1MB...still trying to figure out how to get around that).

This is Coolmath games website after I included the Ad Block extension called uBlock Origin.


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