For people who are not aware, Adblock is an add on that can be installed in many different browsers such as Chrome or Firefox. Adblock does exactly what it says, it blocks ads. Ads are an annoyance on many webpages and so blocking them seems logical if you don’t want an intrusive ad popping up. This all seems well and good, but there are some issues with Adblock as well, which I will get into in a bit.
Why I love Adblock: It’s great for blocking unwanted ads. There are very intrusive ads on web pages that I am sure everyone knows about. When I visit a site and see that there is a video advertisement that pops up because my mouse happened to scroll over the wrong part of the screen, that’s upsetting. I also love Adblock because it gets rid of other unwanted ads. So, I have Adblock installed but recently have been thinking that I should remove it from my list. There are reasons that I have not removed it, mainly the intrusive ads, but I do have some reasons why I seriously want to remove it.
Why I hate Adblock: Adblock blocks ads. It doesn’t always block all ads, but it does a good job at blocking most of them. That’s a problem. For a website like mine, people who click on the ads tend to get people who run the website money. For websites like Youtube or Blip, it gets a bit different. So, if I am on Blip and I upload a video (I am not on blip) I can choose to have ads at the beginning, middle, and/or the end of the video. That’s well and good, about a 30 second ad for a 30 minute video, one at the beginning, middle, and end would be one and a half minutes of ads. When Adblock is enabled, people don’t see those ads, it skips right towards the video, meaning that the ad was not seen by those people.
When an ad is skipped like that, that means that the ad was not watched by the viewer (obviously) if the ad is not watched by the viewer than the content creator gets no money for it. That could be a problem if you want to support the content creator. I tend to disable Adblock for certain sites I visit frequently Channelawesome, Lordkat, and Youtube come to mind. I disable it, because I want the content creators to get money for their work.
I also hate the mentality of people who use Adblock. I have spoken with several people who use Adblock and say “I don’t care if they don’t get money, I don’t want to watch ads.” and that’s well and good, but very selfish in my opinion. Yes, ads can be annoying, but why would you want to purposely and knowingly hinder the person who is creating content that you enjoy? I know that Adblock is something that people will use and probably won’t disable because they hate ads but I do urge you to disable it for sites that you frequent a lot, so you can support the content they create. These people work hard to create content and put it up so they can make a decent living, the least you could do is suffer through two minutes of ads for a 30 minute video.
There are other things I could go into as well, such as Adblock making sites pay them to allow ads through Adblock (seriously) but I think that this has already gone on long enough and no one is going to read it anyway! Leave comments below if you want to tell me I am dumb.