# Adblocking
So here I am, just trying to get in the spooky season on the [*Food Network*](https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/photos/halloween-recipes#item-5) with some *hauntingly* good recipes, when **BAM** I am so rudely (and ironically) hit with an ad for exercise clothes. (Is *Food Network* trying to tell me that baking a five-tier Halloween cake for myself and my dog is perhaps not the healthiest thing, and I should be hitting the gym? Or are they trying to tell me that it would be more comfortable to eat the cake in stretchy workout pants? The latter. **The latter.**)

Before:

Now it is true: I have spent some time (and too much money) on [Carbon38](https://www.carbon38.com). What can I say? I have an addiction to cute exercise sets. But how does the *Food Network* know that? Well, because they're part of a vast network of targeted advertisements, which is far spookier than any mac n' cheese stuffed pepper, let me tell you. And chances are, they, as well as Carbon38, are using my stored third-party cookies to remind me of the exact outfit I was just contemplating buying.


This rose-colored outfit is haunting me, literally. But according to Don Marti's 2017 article "Targeted Advertising considered harmful," this ad would actually not incentivize most users to go and buy it. This shocked me because, honestly, targeted ads get me every time. If I hadn't just bought yet another exercise outfit, this one probably would've worked too. I never knew that these ads cost less for most companies. In fact, I was under the impression that they cost *more* and that their space was *harder* to acquire. But I've since learned that these ads use ad services, such as Adblock, to funnel their ads to a variety of websites and target them to their audience through cookies. Thus reducing the amount of money they have to spend for an ad and increasing the amount of websites it could land on and therefore the potential impressions or even clicks it might get. I had never known this.

But once I began to think about why this might make some apprehensive to targeted ads, the more sense it made. If I were to be on a website I had never visited before, and was hit with a deluge of ads (banners, pop-ups, etc.) all of which so happened to be for a product I was interested in, I would be skeptical of the website. In fact, I'd probably fear that it would infect me with the virus that Hern's 2016 article for *The Guardian* talks about. But since I've been on the *Food Network* website before, I had no reason not to trust it. But legitmate websites like *The New York Times* also have targeted ads, and *The New York Times* website was even one of the websites that Hern (2016) reveals was infected with a malware from these ads. So, who can I trust? Well, an adblocker. I chose UBlock Origin for Chrome.


And aha! I no longer received those pesky ads that get me to spend all my money. (Sorry Carbon38, you're going to have to try a little harder. Though I'm sure I'll be getting an email from you in about 10 minutes, so no worries, I'll be back.)

Now when I see an ad, I can be more confident in the credibility of both the product it is purporting and the publisher. This is truly cooperation at work. Specifically it is indirect reciprocity (Nowack, 2012). Now that I can garner a sense of security and credibility from ads, I am more inclined to give that distributor my business, and so they have benefitted from my impression or my click or even my purchase and I have benefitted from the joys of a new workout outfit or perhaps the joys of finding another novel product.