The Debate Over Ad Blockers Asks the Wrong Questions

Nobody likes paywalls and everyone understands that content creators on the Web need financial compensation. Ads can be seen as the perfect solution, giving "free" content to the consumer and money to the creator. Amazing. Now, we can access our favorite internet content for free, albeit alongside ads prompting us to CLICK HERE NOW. But we can put up with that in order to support the content creators we appreciate, right? It depends. Enter the ominous ad blockers...

Ad blockers are used by millions of people worldwide. They are demonized by the advertising industry. And many online content creators see them as providing a "free lunch", reasonably saying that the display of ads is their revenue stream and that by using an ad blocker, you are depriving them of their well-deserved income. That makes sense and it would even convince me, if it were not for an unfortunate and common mischaracterization of online advertising.

This is how TIME magazine explains how online advertising works, in a 2015 article by Jacob Davidson, published shortly after Apple made the decision to allow content blockers, for its mobile Safari browser, in its App Store:

"Here’s a basic version of how most Internet publishers make money: They produce content, they get people to click on that content, and they make money from the companies who put ads around that content. That’s called display advertising, and the more clicks a publisher gets, the more money it can make this way. This has been a primary revenue source for many online publishers for decades, and it lets some publishers survive without charging users for content."

The mischaracterization is the assumption that online advertising works essentially in the same way as 1980s television commercials: they are simply displayed to try and convince you to make a purchase, and that without further action on your part, that’s all there is to it. “Further action”, in the 1980s, would mean going to a shop or otherwise contacting the company behind the ad in question within a few days of seeing it. Today, it would mean clicking on the ad. The main difference is made to be the timeframe and the convenience.

But is that really all there is to online advertising? Unfortunately not. While television ads were "passive" (i.e. simply displayed in the hopes of prompting a purchase), Internet ads are "active" - meaning, you do not need to interact with the ad in any way for it to interact with you. And that is the crux of the mischaracterization.

In June of 2010, the popular and highly respected technology website arstechnica.com blocked all users employing an ad blocker access to their site, in a 12-hour experiment. After the experiment was over, Ken Fisher, founder of ARSTechnica wrote a short article about the experiment, in which, unfortunately, he also (though perhaps unwittingly) mischaracterized the online advertising business model:

"There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won't hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis. If you have an ad blocker running, and you load 10 pages on the site, you consume resources from us (bandwidth being only one of them), but provide us with no revenue."

The article states that most websites are paid on a per view basis. While it's true that if the ad is not downloaded and hence, not displayed, the hosting website does not get any revenue, "paid on a per view basis" seems to imply that it is the display of the ad that generates revenue. But is that really the case? Kind of... You see, as opposed to old school television ads, online ads are doing a lot more than simply being displayed. But being displayed is the necessary first step for them to do what they are really designed to do: learn as much as they can about you. What does that mean? It means that while the fact that the ad is downloaded and displayed does generate revenue for the hosting website, once it is downloaded and displayed it interacts with your browser and your computer (or whatever connected device you happen to be using) to funnel as much of your personal information as it can - whether you click on it or not. And that is the reason the company behind the ad is happy to pay the hosting website for the opportunity. It’s not so much you looking at the displayed ad as it is the displayed ad “watching” you.

Let's not get into all the specific types of data that are collected, as the list is quite long and goes way beyond the scope of information you may have “voluntarily” shared on the Internet. But just to put things into perspective, Google (one of the largest advertising companies in the world) sorts the user data it collects into over 1 million distinct “buckets” - that is, it has over 1 million attributes to assign to a user profile. I don’t know about you, but I’d have a hard time coming up with 1 million things to say about people I’m close to. Then again, I guess I don’t know them as well as Google does… And privacy concerns aside, online advertising is also a major vector for attacks on your connected devices.

So, the real trade-off is not one between the display of ads and free content, but rather one between detailed surveillance and free content. Using an ad blocker to protect one’s privacy is different from using one to make webpages more esthetically pleasing (or less obnoxious and annoying...). And it’s a big difference, given how ubiquitous breaches and misuse of personal information have become. The latest comes from Facebook/Cambridge Analytica, but there are so many more. Have you already forgotten about Equifax? How about Uber? Or Yahoo? Until the trade-off changes, I’ll keep using my ad blocker.

An informative piece, by CBS/60 Minutes, on data brokers, from 2014. It is safe to assume things have gotten worse...