MIchael CoppolaBlock 2A Essays - Software, Online Advertising

MIchael CoppolaBlock 2A The Effects of AdBlockers on The Internet Advertizing Business Eric Griffith states, "Blocking ads on our site, ... directly impacts the bottom lineand puts our site, our staff, and our future at risk. The same goes for thousands of sites, including big names like The New York Times and Fox News. These large outlets have a huge audience, yet still make a pittance online, so imagine the outcome for a bunch of smaller, online-only venues," Internet advertising has been greatly exhausted by the growing community of AdBlock developers. Adblocking is a new way for users to easily remove advertisements from their favorite webpages before viewing them. Although adblock can harm websites by lowering their revenue, they should be used in moderation to remove intrusive or excessively annoying advertisements. "AdBlock and AdBlock Plus has made it possible for Internet users to quickly and easily block pesky and often considered annoying advertisements when consuming content on the Internet" according to Guillaume Bouchard. As an add-on in any browser, Adblock blocks HTTP and HTTPS requests from the IPs that are kept on a list by the developers of AdBlock and AdBlock Plus, that are known for being the source of the plethora of banners, pop-ups, and certain flash applications (Eric Griffith). Users can choose to add or remove certain sources, decide whether ads can be displayed or not on chosen websites, and in newer versions, select an advertising intensity for a site. AdBlock is a simple yet effective utility that anyone can use. Adblock appeals to users who don't like the look of ads scattered among their page. This is proven shown by the "rise in AdBlock adoption rates from a PageFair and Adobe 2014 report, users are increasingly casting their vote to reduce the amount of Internet spam." as stated by Guillaume Bouchard. Advertisements can pop-up, getting in the way of your work, makes annoying and unexpected sounds and make respectable websites seem like foolery and games. Advertizing can appear in the form of commercial videos before watching your requested content, sometimes forcing you to watch up to 40 seconds of advertizing before you begin your video. With all of these things dripping into your website and making a mess, they'll need to use a substantial amount of data and bandwidth, causing your mobile data plans to run short early and websites on your desktop ages to load, much slower than expected. Since these advertisements source from other servers, this means you could be accessing two, thr ee, five websites more than you need to just to fill your page up with throbbing advertisements. These issues like load times, popups and annoying sounds and animations make adblocking that more appealing to users. We have reached an AdBlock reckoning, where websites have crumbled out of their existence. Advertisements are helpful when they show useful sales and websites that the user may be interested in. Over the years, advertising has become synonymous with the Internet. Some users may not even notice or find it annoying. More importantly, well-targeted advertising can be informative and useful to users (Bouchard). The thing is, people don't even mind helping the websites, just rather doing it by other means, when Ken Fischer said "We made the mistake of assuming that everyone who is blocking ads at Ars is doing so with malice. As it turns out, only a few people are, and many (most?) indicated you are happy to help out." after the experiment ARS had conducted where people using AdBlock were required to pay a fee to continue viewing the site without ads by joining a subscription service by them. "Most importantly, publishers will become picky about what ads they run. Adblock Plus is turn ed on by default but it allows users to disable it on any page." according to Ilya Vedrashko. But more stubborn websites will move around this. She believes "A technology arms race. A counter-technology will be developed to allow publishers to detect and perhaps disable the ad-skipping functionality. At the very least, publishers will demand that readers turn their ad zappers off in exchange for viewing content. Advertising networks will learn how to disguise their addresses to fool the black list [sic]." At