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# System prepended metadata

title: Online Ads & Blockers

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# Online Ads & Blockers

Ad blockers should ... block ads. Right? 

Somehow, this statement is not entirely true. As [Taylor](https://restoreprivacy.com/report-ad-blockers-allowing-acceptable-ads/) wrote, some ad blockers allow "acceptable ads" to be shown to their users. The ones deemed as "acceptable" were paid to be shown through these ad blockers. This completely makes ad blockers lose their value. What's the point of blocking ads if they still do not block *all* ads? A doctor is not going to do half of an operation because someone paid for them not to. So why would these ad blockers not do their job? It is against their very purpose. 

Additionally, many of my classes tend to overlap in their content. Perfectly enough, the lessons in my marketing class this week are about integrated marketing campaigns. The textbook discussed how consumers believe advertised products have more legitimacy. This concept exactly mirrors where [Marti](https://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/) wrote that a company spending money on advertising campaigns justifies a customer purchasing their product. This shows that the company may have enough sales in the first place to spend that much money on advertisement. I always really appreciate being able to learn different content through different perspectives. 

However, I could not help but be bombarded, ironically enough, by ads when reading Ax [Sharma's](https://restoreprivacy.com/report-ad-blockers-allowing-acceptable-ads/) article. There were ads all over the screen: on the side, as banners, within the article itself ... everywhere. Sharma discussed the harm of a website being disguised as malware, but this website disguised valuable information as a means to supply advertisements to consumers. I could not take the content very seriously as their website was completely inundated with ads yet talked about the potential harm of ads at the same time. 

I decided that Sharma's article, therefore, was a good opportunity to test the ad blocker on. 
Here is before I used the ad blocker: 
![screenshot before](https://i.imgur.com/6Z1lnt6.png)
We can clearly see one banner ad, one ad inside the article itself, and two ads on the side. 

This next screenshot shows the results of using the ad blocker:
![screenshot after](https://i.imgur.com/CKiNbNp.png)
The banner ad, the ad within the content itself and one of two of the side ads disappeared with the ad blocker. While the ad blocker did not get rid of 100% of the ads, it certainly made the viewing and reading experience of this article much better. I did not feel as visually overwhelmed when using the ad blocker. 
