Is ad-blocking a blessing in disguise?

Ad-blocking isn’t new. But the topic gained prominence, or should I say exploded, with Apple’s release of its latest iOS9. The new OS brought along ad-blocking extensions to the Safari web browser and allowed ad-blocking apps on its Apple store. There’s lots of discussion online about how ad-blocking can kill content publishers who survive on paid advertising, the raging war between the tech giants behind these, as well as doom-sayers purporting the end to free internet.

Well, as with every new trend, we can be sure to find lots of online information by people who know little about the topic, just trying to grab reader attention or place products within articles. How about I say we block them too?

Jokes aside, online ad-blocking does have a huge impact on consumers, advertisers and publishers and anyone who does business on the internet. The topic is probably too wide to cover comprehensively here, but we’ll give anyone who gives a hoot about ad-blocking the lowdown on what you can expect with this shake-up.

Why We Hate Ads

Blinking banner ads, pop-up windows that disrupts reading, autoplay videos… do we really need to go into why we loathe them?

In the last decade, the internet has been plagued by information pollution. What started as a revolution to increase information reach and spread of knowledge became an information dump, with more time spent filtering out quality content than finding relevant information. So much so that the online audience has adapted to these annoying ad-tactics by building up immunity against them – developing banner blindness, buying ad-blocking software, and increasing their reflexivity in closing off pop-ups in nano seconds.

What we saw next was advertisers becoming more creative and attentive, turning towards inbound marketing as a solution – creating quality content that drives consumers towards its products rather than trying to reach potential customers with annoying email blasts and telemarketing.

What’s Next?

While the proliferation of inbound marketing is all good for consumers (less spam in the face), ad-blocking seems to push advertisers increasingly in this direction. The main problem though, is that not everyone makes money using this model, especially those that publishes quality content. Most quality content sites make use of paid advertising to sustain themselves, without which there’s little generation of revenue, except if consumers one day decide to pay for these content. (Nooooooooo).

The Good

Faster Load time – even with our extensive 4G network in Singapore, we still have problems with loading up websites on mobile phones in certain areas, say in the MRT. Imagine that in other countries that has less access. An experiment on how ad-blocking helps load times on websites turn up some compelling results.

Less disruption on web activities – cleaner-looking websites with less distraction, no video ads, flash ads, flashing ads or pop-ups. Enough said.

The Bad

The Ugly

The Future