A rant on Advertisements
I initially wanted to post this as a series of tweets, but decided against it since it would be difficult to compact everything enough. Besides, this way I have an easy collection of points I can link in case a discussion comes up.
- Ads support our favorite content and content creators and enable them to create more of that stuff we enjoy so much or find useful otherwise. It also is the backbone of many free services and websites on the internet.
- Companies and entities are buying ad-space to get your attention, so you ultimately buy or use their product. If the product is available for free, it's often powered by ads itself.
- The value of ads is indirectly influenced by the amount of people who react to the ad and use the advertised product or service. As more people ignore ads regardless of viewing them or not, the value of the ad-space goes down. And so does the money that goes to our content.
- To add to the previous point, showing more ads might have an even greater negative effect on the value of the ad-space, as people are probably more likely to ignore or just get annoyed by them. Additionally, I'm probably not the only one who gets annoyed by ads, especially attention-grabbing ones, so they choose to not buy the advertised product/service. This would have an even greater effect on the ad value, though it probably won't occur as often.
Now, this post is written by a person who absolutely despises ads and the whole idea behind it. Though not the content or creators that are supported by it. In my opinion ads should ideally be a way for you to discover interesting related content put into place because two awesome people thought it would be good to share their thing with each other's userbase.
But sadly they're not. Most of the time their whole intention is to get your attention and interest you in something that you probably wouldn't've wanted otherwise. Sometimes by straight up lying to you or just leaving out the not-so-great bits.
And that's not all. Many, if not most ads embedded into sites are collecting data. It's often said this is only used to show you more relevant ads (which does benefit both sides I suppose) and to find out how many people who've viewed an ad actually ended up buying / using the advertised product. But the potential for tracking and creating profiles of your surfing habits is there.
While I don't want to convince you of anything - other than taking an afternoon to write this up I've not done anything else like research -- which in hindsight I probably should've done - I would love to get you to think about this, and maybe accept (not adopt) a different viewpoint.
So, with all that out of the way, is it really that bad to use an ad-blocker? If you're genuinely interested in supporting content creators in other ways? Or even if you just hate ads?
As always, let me know what you think. Join me next time when I talk about why I like piracy!