# Online Ads and Blockers

## March 22, 2022

Online ads are everywhere we look on the internet - almost any website, media, or social platform. These ads have grown in scope and precision with cookies and data that track users and create personalized ads. Ads do benefit people as it allows companies to pay for content that users receive for free. However, ads can be quite annoying. In order to counter this inundation of advertisement, ad blockers have been created for users to install their computers and browsers. But the question is, are these effective? And should users be easily able to block these ads?

One big aspect of advertisement that people take issue with is how targeted ads have become. [Don Marti (2017)](https://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/) discusses how most people are not okay with targeted online advertising, and as a result more and more people are investing in ad blockers. He justifies the rationality of advertising as signaling: companies that believe their product is high quality can spread word of their product and therefore their mission. There is a delicate balance between ads being irrelevant and ads being too targeted, so brands test the boundaries of what is acceptable. Though users use ad blockers to attempt to regulate these, some ads still filter through ad blockers with an "acceptable ads" criteria. [Sven Taylor (2020)](https://restoreprivacy.com/report-ad-blockers-allowing-acceptable-ads/) details how certain reliable websites such as Amazon, Google, and Bing can filter verified ads through the ad blocker. 200 million people receive these advertisements despite their choice to filter out ads.

The question asks whether users should be able to use ad blockers, whether they are ethical or not, and I think that is a difficult question to answer. Ad blockers, such as AdBlock plus, do disclose to users that it shows ads deemed as acceptable. However, as Taylor (2020) points out, many people who do use ad blockers do so for the sake of their privacy from data tracking and personalized ads. Do ad blocker users have the right to be hidden from all ads? Or should they be subject to ads like everyone else in order to keep the internet free?

In order to test this, I downloaded the UBlock ad blocker software. I decided to test it out on BuzzFeed news because I remember there always being a large amount of ads on that site. Attached is the webpage before installing the ad blocker:


And after installing the ad blocker:


It was quite a nice surprise to see how undisturbed my web browsing is. I use the internet mainly in the form of social media, but now seeing how peaceful my reading will be, maybe I will read more news on websites such as Buzzfeed that don't have paywalls but now longer have annoying ads. I have never liked the idea of companies tracking my data, especially learning about third party cookies, so I hope that the ad blocker can hinder this process as well. I wonder how this blocker would function with Amazon, Google, or other reliable websites - would they allow acceptable ads, or completely block everything?