Why People on the Internet Block Advertisements

Every tech-savvy teenager out there will tell you to “install an adblocker to reduce the amount of time a website loads on your browser”. As someone working in marketing, you’d probably be disheartened to hear someone say that. Or so you’d be if you didn’t block ads as well. Let’s face it: everyone blocks ads. It doesn’t matter what kind or what it is for. You can have an advertisement for a bedroom king set sale or an ad for a new pizza meal. But people won’t find those ads if they block them indiscriminately.

This is entirely natural, as marketers have designed ads to be able to track down specific demographics and relentlessly push companies’ products on them. If product sales are too low for that month, it would always be the marketing team’s fault. As their job is to make sure that everyone buys the products and services they market, possibly with the least effort one can make, they have resorted to the most annoying tactics marketers ever devised. Thus, it is no surprise that everyone blocks ads.

But this isn’t just the only reason people block ads. People block them for a lot of different reasons:

Ads are security risks

One of the biggest reasons people block advertisements is that these ads are signs of security risks for those viewing them. Google’s functions, for example, let marketers track and stalk their users so that they can send the right ads to the right people. This is technically stalking, and unless a person uses an adblocker or something similar, there’s no way users can avoid this.

During the 1990s and the 2000s some ads also brought with them spyware and malware. They still do now, but not as much as before. People have learned to associate advertisements with these things ever since. Nowadays there’s a new gimmick of adding crypto currency miners inside the ads’ code, and this eats up the user’s RAM, potentially damaging their computers. This adds even more to internet users’ dislike of ads.

Ads make web pages load slower

Back in the day, big websites could earn lots of money by covering their sites with lots of ads. This caused their web pages to load very slowly, especially with a 15kbps dial-up internet connection. Adblock was marketed to make browsing faster by blocking out all the unnecessary ads. People tried it, and adblockers delivered. The word spread, and ads are now also blamed for causing web pages to load slowly. Nowadays, messy coding and heavy JavaScript are the reasons a webpage loads slowly, but you can bet people still believe that it’s because of ads.

Relieving user concerns

This negative view of ads profoundly impairs the use of ads to promote products, which may make ads slightly ineffective for marketing. In response to usage of Adblock, many sites now block users from seeing the site’s content. This causes problems not only for the site, because it drives away users, but also for marketers and the companies they work with.

To solve this, it might be a good idea to make people more aware of how ads work and that no one is going to use their private information maliciously, even if through the use of such data, marketers found a user breaking the law. A hard stance on neutrality and showing commitment to the privacy of the people they advertise to might be the only way to assuage their fears.

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