I Hate Ads. Both on TV and online. There are 5 main reason I hate online ads.
1. Ads slow my browsing experience. Significant number online ads are use rich media (google text ads are notable exception) and thus take up a significant bandwidth on an page. Its unacceptable to me that ads slow my browsing experience, even more when I am browsing for text (like news sites or blogs), or researching something online. See Venturebeat study.
2. Ads are a battery drain Its been proven that flash drains battery a lot faster. Significant number of non text ads are in flash, and I don’t want them draining my precious battery. See Ars Technica study.
3. Ads are a bandwidth hog. We now live in era of tiered mobile data plan. We tether our computers to our smart phones, browsing via our mobile data plans. I want to maximize my browsing experience by seeing the content I am interested in, and do not want ads taking a bite out of our data plans.
4. Ads compromise my privacy. Quite a few ads plant tracking cookies. I hate being tracked online, as much as you would if you were tracked in real life. see this article
5. Ads profile me. Most ads I see are totally irrelevant, or profile me. They tend to be just white noise that I would rather not have. Look at this Wall Street Journal study.
All first tier web browsers have very effective ad blocking plugins (chome, firefox, safari ). These plugins are smart enough to prevent the browsers from downloading the section of the websites that looks like an “ad”, they use variety of heuristics to do this - they look at the size of the image, the source of the image, placement of the image etc to determine that. By blocking Ads they promise a faster, more secure online browsing experience, a longer battery life and saving on the data plan. All this for free. Also the ad blocking plugins preserve the site layout, and thus they do not compromise the content. I use ad blocks on all my browsers. It is the usually the first plugin I install. In fact, I don’t even upgrade to a newer version of the browser if the ad blockers are not available.
While the venture capital industry is crediting with fueling the tech startups, the Ad industry is truly responsible for keeping them alive. Most startups depend heavily on Ads as a revenue source. I do understand the online rule : If you do not pay for your product, you ARE the product. And I do not want to pay for stuff. So per the law I need to give up my privacy and let the site productize me, or I compromise my browsing experience by viewing ads. Hence my ethical dilemma. I don’t want to pay of stuff online. I don’t want to watch ads (which indirectly pay for my online stuff). This means I essentially want to consume my online services for free. Is this analogous to shop lifting ? Am I being unethical by blocking ads and disallowing the potential revenue the site could have made ?
I think the ad industry needs to innovate. They need to make sure that the ads are not a nuisance.
1. They are not heavy (the ads should not increase the bandwidth usage/download time by say 5 to 10% of the actual content).
2. They don't use technologies that are detrimental (flash).
3. They should not track me, if I don't want to.
I think Ad industry is taking a right step with Open data alliance. Hopefully they will figure out a way so I can live with ads, and do not feel like a shop lifter when I am browsing.
interesting article
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