Ads are annoying. That is something that everybody, even the guy that invented pop-up ads, can agree on. Ads crowd the page when browsing through articles, get in the way when scrolling through Instagram, force little ten-second gaps when watching YouTube, and generally make doing things online inconvenient.

One solution people came up with is ad blockers. Ad blockers are used by a lot of people mainly for convenience, but ad blockers can also do important things such as protecting the viewer from malware and helping the website load faster. The average person probably doesn’t care about using an ad blocker, however, the widespread use of ad blockers has a definite and noticeable impact on online advertising.

Benefits of ad blockers

Most people that use ad blockers use them simply for convenience. Ad blockers are getting more and more popular with the increased amount of flashy and intrusive ads.

However, blocking ads is not the only thing that ad blockers can do.

How ad blockers work is that they stop requests that try to download content into the browser. This makes your websites load faster, which is important for people with slow computers or who just have dozens of tabs open all the time.

Some ads also download cookies into a user’s computer to track their browsing activity so they can better personalize their ads, however, these could be used or exploited by hackers or other external attacks to access a person’s sensitive information. Ad blockers are one simple way to deal with these threats to our security.

Cons of ad blockers

While ad blockers are useful for people that are trying to keep the ads out, the people whose jobs depend on getting more customers from online ads suffer from it. YouTubers and website owners earn a portion of their money from putting ads in their content, when ad blockers stop ads, they also stop the creators from earning money.

Other people that may benefit from online ads are new businesses and people that need online ads to help get their new business off the ground. Without being able to use online ads, these businesses would have to invest more effort and resources into getting more customers.

Impact on online advertising

While ad blockers, seeing more widespread use, are bad for companies and businesses that rely on them, they can be good overall for the marketing industry. With ad blockers keeping most forms of online advertising off the table, companies and businesses have to get creative by either going through ad blockers or advertising in a way that doesn’t trigger the ad blockers.

Some websites and businesses are already using new ways to advertise their services. In many major news websites, users get a pop-up that asks them to remove ad blockers or subscribe to them.

While many users hate these websites, I personally believe that they are right to do that. They need to pay their employees and server fees somehow, and using viewer subscriptions and ad revenue is a quick and easy way for big and small businesses alike to earn money.

Other more clever businesses like Honey, Nord-VPN, and even some mobile games have tried going directly to the content creators rather than just paying YouTube or Google to do it for them. While advertising like this usually takes more money and their advertisements only reach a small number of people, they don’t have to spend time designing the ads. Best of all, getting their stuff advertised by the YouTuber/website means they don’t have to deal with the ad blocker and their ads would have more appeal to the audience because it’s someone they like saying it rather than some generic actor.
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Ad blockers are not only good for the users, they also help the advertising world and how businesses do advertising. Ad blockers keep a user’s device safe from malware and help everything to run smoother. For advertisements, ad blockers force big and small businesses alike to think of new and creative ways to sell their product without getting blocked by ad blockers, although ad blockers do still harm websites that rely on ad revenue (basically all of them), people should be allowed to turn on ad blockers for the sake of convenience, and maybe in turn not ignore websites when they ask you to turn ad blockers off.