The online world is awash with advertising, and on some sites it can get a little oppressive, and it seems like half the loading time for a page is due to the ads that crowd the screen. People buy ad-block programs so they can have a less commercially saturated web experience. This is not something that is appreciated by those companies that dominate the web and so they are willing to throw big bucks at the problem to make it go away.
The Financial Times says Google, Microsoft and Amazon have all paid money to Eyeo, a German start-up company with an ad-blocker, to get on their white list. It seems weird that these giants are resorting to this measure, and it seems more than a little odd that an ad-blocker would be willing to stream ads. Filthy lucre makes for odd bedfellows sometimes.
Targeted ads are part of the landscape and you get used to tuning them out, the thing you are really trying to avoid is the spam, but how is it going to work for people if ad-blockers cave to financial pressure? Will they abide the intrusion, or will they just switch up their ad-blocking app?
A lot of sites use the ads to make it feasible financially for them to actually run, so it isn’t so bad in some cases; a necessary evil if you will. I don’t suppose we’ll get a browser that has a built-in feature allowing you to turn off ads until the main browser companies get out of bed with the search engine companies and other groups that have interest in advertising themselves and helping to fund the browsers.
Advertising companies do so much better when they create a desire in their customers to see the adverts, such as the recent Super Bowl ads, instead of force-feeding them to people where they sometimes want to enjoy a specific experience without being sold to. You can sidestep the friction it creates by maintaining a code of etiquette where people know when and where and what to expect from a website and the adverts it is going to put in front of its viewers, and this seems preferable.
Just because Google, Microsoft and Amazon get blocked by these apps in certain places, it isn’t like they are going to be blanketly eradicated all over the place. Should there be commercial free zones, or if we want our net neutrality is the omnipresent ad going to be the price we have to pay? If it is, is it really all that bad?