The Adblock debate continues raging in light of litigation over the particularly popular Adblock Plus, which now boasts over 100 million users (if anything, I’m surprised it’s not even higher).
That news didn’t prompt me to finally publish this. I’d been letting a draft of my personal Adblocking case study sit in my pending posts folder for a while, until someone chimed in while I was discussing Adblock with someone on Twitter. The user, whose post has been deleted due to the inevitable backlash, helpfully dragged up the old argument that adblocking software is tantamount to theft.
Others have addressed this argument in more detail but the problem I have is how it dehumanizes your own readers. Dismissively labeling an entire segment of your readership as thieves helps justify a mentality that they’re a bunch of parasitic leeches who want everything for free. It ignores any context or nuance in why people adblock and jettisons any sense of responsibility the actual content owners and advertisers have in their role in making adblocking software popular.
So here’s another patented edition of “Make advertisers and content creators embarrassed when they discover that the Internet isn’t collectively out to steal from them.”
My own story isn’t necessarily the most memorable one but it will likely be familiar if you filter advertisements. I vividly remember July of 2010. I was trying to watch a 20 second video of a funny commercial. Except a 30 second pre-video advertisement for Bacardi (not the best targeting) insisted on running. Normally I wouldn’t have minded, but this ad – which was longer than the video itself – kept buffering every two seconds while I was on a reasonably fast Wi-Fi connection. I refreshed my page twice, tried another browser, and tried reloading Firefox altogether. Still nothing.
I resigned myself to watching the ad. It couldn’t be that bad, right? After waiting a full sixty seconds, the video ad was 13 seconds in. Finally, out of sheer irritation, I Googled this “adblock” I’d heard so much about. The very first time I loaded a video instantly, there was no going back.
Of course, this was only the straw that broke the camel’s back. Over the past year I had been dealing with this more and more frequently in addition to the usual slew of obnoxious auto-playing video ads that you had to search an entire page for in order to shut them up. I tend to use adblock fairly judiciously and I make a habit of disabling it for content creators and websites I genuinely want to support, but there’s no way I would disable it.
I often wonder if advertisers and online publications really think the average user sits down, cracks their knuckles and thinks “Righto, it’s time for me to turn on Adblock and get some content for free!” I’m sure some people use Adblock in order out of spite if they hate your content or publication that much, but it’s not as if stories like mine are in short supply. The people pointing their fingers and trying to shame users are asking the wrong questions.
Lastly, here’s something for the online sites and bloggers who have tried talking down to Adblocking users to remember: Shaming, mocking and belittling people who use Adblockers won’t make them read your content, and it certainly make them want to support you. Just ask the sites that block ad-filtering software.