# Ad Blocking

### Before adBlock

### After adBlock
Surfing the web has become an integral part of our daily lives, and with this we are bombarded everyday with dozens of digital advertisements, which may or may not be to invasive to our experience. This being said, many of us have opted to use an adblocker in order to make our web-surfing experience less cluttered and putt off the annoyances that some of these online ads bring us. As demonstrated above in my screenshots, the webpage using the adblocker makes the website look more clean, which enables us to enjoy the content more freely.

This being said ,this poses a bit of a dilemma not just for the advertisers but the websites publishing the contents. These browser plugins have been attacked as a “modern-day protection racket” and are being criticized for harming the free online publications business models. However, in the article “Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by ransomware advertising” it is stated that adblockers may be able to protect users from malware attacks, while also making web-surfing faster and more pleasant. With this, a graph displayed on the article “Targeted Advertising Considered Harmful” displays an increasing in interest in how to block ads and ads retargeting from 2007 onwards.

Ironically, an AdBlock platform called AdBlock plus also now sells ads. This is a service which you actually have to pay additional money for and in theory the service will provide you with smaller less obtrusive ads. This seems a little bit counter intuitive, however this might help to achieve some what of a middle ground as adblockers have been ridiculed for obstructing the business models of these online content providers. This would allow publishers to still get 80% of the ad revenue while 20% divided among the other parties involved. If this type of service is implemented properly it may actually help out advertising companies as it stated that even in 2016 the return on ad spend is 3.94 USD in magazines compared to 2.63 USD for online display ads. This is actually a surprising statistic to me considering that I believe more people are using the internet today than reading magazines.

For me, I have been using an adblocker for almost 5 years as I find most online advertisements completely un-useful. This is especially true since firstly I normally am not heavily influenced by the advertisement of random services I see on ads, nor do I tend to want to buy anything unnecessary , and I also find it extremely obtrusive to my web browsing experience.