Cyber Monday is a huge day for online shopping and for many businesses to make a lot of sales. On many websites, you will probably find pesky advertisements and pop-ups explaining how good the deals are. These ads can sometimes be very distracting and annoying. Unless you have an Ad Blocker enabled on your laptop. Then you can go through your day ad-free with nothing to distract you. But have you ever stopped to wonder what this does to the companies trying to advertise?
For those who don’t know, Adblock allows internet-goers to view content online without getting ads. Anyone can download this browser extension to block every ad, including pop-ups and flash animations. There are 45 million active monthly users of ad-blockers. So what effect does this have on the companies? This year, ad-blockers will lead to an estimated $22 billion in lost revenue stolen from online publishers and sites that depend on advertising revenue to keep their company alive.
Producers in the advertising industry have come up with new ways they can make ads harder to block. Certain websites can now detect if you are using an adblocker and will ask you to turn it off or else you will not be able to view their content. Some websites keep their content behind a paywall which makes them less vulnerable to the effects of ad-blocks, but it also risks them losing money because readers won’t pay for the content. Some of these websites have even started talking to Adblock companies. There have been deals with a few websites that pay the ad blockers to slip their ads through their ad-blocking filters.
Online advertising is very important in our current society but as Adblock is mostly used by Millennials, it makes you wonder, what will happen to the future of advertising?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Namibia's Economy
Namibia is a country that not many people think about. It is a small nation, right above South Africa, that bases most of its economy on to...
I never thought about the economics behind ad blockers, and I think your post does a great job explaining it. I myself have ad blockers on browsers Chrome and Safari and I enjoy them. Although they may be great for me, they are advertising agencies worst nightmare. Ad blockers lessen the amount of views and clicks on ads which take away revenue from these companies. Is this even legal? I believe as ad blocking technology develops, the sooner we will see their ban.
ReplyDeleteYour post does a great job of showing both perspectives of the people who use an adblocker and the companies profit from ad revenue. Does the revenue lost from using an adblocker come from the fact that people are less likely to see the ad and therefore less likely to buy the product? I use an adblocker, but when I do see an ad I almost never actually buy what they are trying to sell. Do the companies take that into account when calculating their losses?
ReplyDelete