Thoughts on ad blockers

After last week’s column about uBlock Origin, we had a spirited discussion in the Advisorator chat room about the ethics of using an ad blocker. In particular, Matthew Keys of The Desk raised concerns about how using an ad blocker can deprive independent journalists (himself included) of revenue. I appreciate that Matthew brought this up, and after some reflection, I wrote down some thoughts that he encouraged me to share here.

Matthew raised a couple of separate questions, the first of which is whether it is acceptable to recommend ad blockers to readers.

My feeling is yes. Readers have been given a raw deal by the current state of online advertising: Accept ads that track their every move around the web, create malware risks, and put a drain on system resources/battery life, or block those techniques and deprive revenue to publishers. I wish that wasn’t the choice, but it is, and I believe users should have control over what happens to their data and what happens on their computers.

The second question is what publishers should do about ad blocking, which is becoming table stakes in basically every browser besides Chrome. Safari already blocks the vast majority of ads by default. So do Edge, Firefox, DuckDuckGo’s browser, Brave, Vivaldi, and Arc. Regardless of what happens in my little newsletter, publishers will need to adapt to that reality.

There’s no perfect answer to this, but I think there are many possibilities. PCWorld has built a nice business around affiliate revenue, has a subscription digital magazine, and has a YouTube channel that I presume is monetized through ads/sponsors. Fast Company has a premium subscription, an events business, and various awards which vendors can pay to apply for. You can have a newsletter that monetizes through direct ad deals that don’t rely on tracking. You can sell special reports, solicit donations, or throw up paywalls. And maybe there’s room for a more privacy-respecting kind of online ad. I don’t think the answer is to just guilt people into accepting a system that does not respect their system resources or their privacy.

A few other stray thoughts:

You could argue that some ad blockers are more harmful than others, for instance by hiding the pop-ups that discourage ad blocker usage. I don’t see a huge distinction as ultimately it’s the same choice being made. Notably, in browsers that let you choose between ad blocking or just tracker blocking, those nastygrams show up regardless. The tracking goes hand-in-hand with the advertising.

Any time you consume content in ways that the creator did not sanction, there are going to be some ethical dilemmas. You could argue, for instance, that DVR is a form of revenue theft, if not for the creator (which may still get paid to serve the ad), then for the advertiser. Yet I continue to recommend services like PlayOn and Channels DVR because they provide control for users in a system that is increasingly stacked against them. I view ad blockers in a similar way.

In any case, I don’t entirely believe that publishers are to blame. A lot of this falls on the tech giants that build the ad tech system and have encouraged a race to the bottom on advertising, thereby making many webpages intolerable to read.

All of that said, consider disabling your ad blocker on sites whose journalism you appreciate, particularly if they are respectful with the quality and quantity of ads they show.

Got your own thoughts on the matter? You can always send me an email.