#133 Ad Blockers

Approximately one out of four Americans use an ad blocker. But what are the implications of ad blockers for publishers, consumers, and the advertising market? We'll discuss the ethics and mechanics of ad blocking in this episode. Welcome to Copec Explain Software, the podcast where we make computing intelligible. In this episode, we're going to discuss ad blockers, and maybe a lot of you listening use one. In fact, in the United States, one out of four consumers uses an ad blocker. Web browsers have also started to have some kinds of ad blocking technology built in. We're going to discuss how ad blockers work, and we'll spend a lot of time discussing some of the ethical and business implications of this technology.

I think we should start with a little bit of information. What do we mean when we say ad blockers?

Well, we're all familiar with advertisements when we go to a website, and ad blockers basically stop you from seeing those advertisements. That might mean that nothing appears where the ad was supposed to appear, or it might mean the webpage is actually slightly reconfigured. So it's more put together where the ads would have been. But regardless, you basically just don't see either an autoplay video or an image or banner ad, or even some textual ads that you otherwise would see if you didn't have the ad blocker installed. And I use the word installed loosely because not all ad blockers actually are on your computer. And we'll get into that in a couple minutes.

How are ad blockers typically delivered?

There's two main delivery mechanisms for ad blockers. One is as a browser extension. So that's something that you add to your Safari Chrome Firefox web browser that is constantly working, analyzing every webpage that you visit and making sure to not send out HTTP requests for domains that might be delivering ads or actually analyzing the components of the website and saying, you know what, this space here looks like? It's where an ad is supposed to be. So I'm going to hide that. That's one form. The other form are proxy servers. A famous one is called Pihole. This is where actually the ad blocker is running on another computer, and your Internet connection is being routed through that computer so that all the traffic that's coming in and out can be analyzed. And if traffic that's coming through appears to be ad traffic, it's not actually sent that final step to your client, whether that be your smartphone or your PC. So two different kinds of ad blockers. We have ad blockers that are browser extensions, and we have ad blockers that are proxy servers which require a little bit more work to set up because you're setting them up on another machine that's basically filtering the information that's making it to your final desktop or laptop or smartphone.

So is this something that consumers are purchasing or are they free? How do adblocker companies make money?

There's approximately three different business models. Some of these are totally free and open source software. Some of them have a premium subscription, so they might have a free version. But then if you want all the features or the most elite blocking, you're actually paying something. And then some of them actually have a deal that they strike with publishers where they do let through some of the ads and take a slice of that ad revenue. That's a pretty interesting business model. So they're not complete blockers, they're not totally neutral. They're getting paid to show some of the ads and they're letting those ads through and then they're just blocking the ones that they're not getting paid for. You can think about this as kind of like protection money, almost like mafia esque. If they get paid the protection money, they let the ad through. But for anybody who doesn't pay them, they don't let it through.

How do these companies know which ones are the good ads and which ones are the bad ads?

Yeah, I was surprised how much of this is just based on good lists and bad lists. And that includes actually just the base ad blocking mechanism, not just the ones that get paid by certain advertisers and publishers. Believe it or not, a lot of it is literally just a big list that say, well, this domain is where ads come from. So any content coming from this domain is going to be blocked. And they maintain this giant list of bad domains, domains that send ads. And then they have a list of, okay, domains, domains where maybe the ads are not offensive or the ads are ones that we allow because we get that protection money from the publisher, a slice of the ad revenue. So it's literally just based on giant lists of good site, bad site, good domain, bad domain, which is pretty primitive when you think about it, but obviously effective because, you know, a lot of ads are delivered by just a few giant ad servers that serve a lot of the web's ads. And so if you just block their domains, a lot of those ads are not going to come through.

That sounds kind of nice, probably for a consumer. What are the benefits of ad blockers?

There's a lot of benefits. I mean, number one, obviously you're not going to be annoyed by these ads. So they're not going to take up your time. Number two, they are actually going to decrease how much bandwidth you're using because, of course, those ads actually have data that comes with them. Right. Those images, those movies, you got megabytes of data on some websites that you go to, just of ads that are coming across. If you pay for every megabyte of bandwidth that you use, you're actually going to save some money. Most of us are on unlimited plans today, at least in the United States, so we don't worry about that as much. But on top of that, because all that data is not being sent across, your computer doesn't have to process it. So you're actually going to increase the performance of your web browsing experience. So we got less data being used, we have higher performance, and we have less annoyance. Sounds pretty good, but not so good.

To the folks who are publishing the websites we're going to.

Right. Obviously it's not good for the advertisers, but what a lot of people don't think about as much is it's also not good for the publishers. Because if those ads are how a lot of publishers get paid, when you go to a website, why is the website covered in ads? Because that's how the folks who are writing the article that you want to read are getting paid. And so if you think about the writer who wrote your article, right, how are they getting compensated? They're paid by the publisher, right. And the publisher is paid by the advertisers. So if those ads don't get through, some of that revenue is not getting through. And ultimately, they might not be able to employ as many writers or not be able to pay the writers as well as they were before, if they're not getting as much advertising revenue. And you might say, well, these are all big, greedy corporations. Well, you know, some of them are, some of them aren't. And whether or not they are, that's where the revenue comes from. That actually pays the people who work there.

And while there are ad blockers, there's also been shifts in what's allowed by the web browsers built in already.

Right. So over time, web browsers have become more consumer centric when it comes to ads starting. I think it's about 15 years ago, browsers started blocking pop ups. So you go to somewhere it used to be, if you remember browsing the web in the nineties and the early oos, you go to some websites and you'd just be bombarded by pop up advertisements it was so annoying. You have to close this window, close that window, whatever. But browsers luckily started saying, that's just really offensive. We don't want our consumers having to deal with that. They said, okay, we're going to block pop up windows. That was pretty obvious, pretty basic thing to do. More recently, and it started with the safari browser from Apple and Firefox from Mozilla. They started blocking, cross site tracking. These are cookies. And we did a prior episode on cookies that I'll link to in the show notes. Often these are cookies that we're seeing from one site to another site to track you and know, well, you went on that site first and now you're on this other site. Therefore, we know that it's the same person and so we can show them an advertisement for that thing that they were at earlier. So you're on like some totally unrelated website. Let's say you're on a phishing website, right? And then later on you go on Facebook. Well, maybe on that phishing website there happened to be a Facebook like button, or maybe even some of the ads were served by somebody who also works with Facebook. And then you go on Facebook and you see an ad for phishing and you wonder, how did that happen? Well, this cross site tracking mechanism, often delivered through cookies, although there are other ways as well, is how that happens. So some browsers have started blocking that over the last five years or so, and that has stopped some of the most egregious types of advertisements, where we're really just tracking all your activity and figuring out exactly what you're doing. But not all of it. It's blocked some of it, but not all of it. But that doesn't mean the advertisements don't show, they're just less relevant. Right? If I don't know you were on the phishing website, I can't show you a phishing ad, but I can still show you an ad. So it's not a mechanism to eliminate advertising actually makes the advertising less relevant, which you might say is not actually a good thing for you in some ways. Because once you rather see ads that are actually things you want to buy.

Might be good for your wallet, right.

Rather than just random things that maybe you don't really want to buy. Right. And it also is therefore worse for the publishers, too. It makes the ads less relevant and therefore less valuable. Less people actually click on them. So the advertiser and the publisher make less money. So there's pros and cons and we have to balance the economic model. So that the publisher can still earn a living and still be able to deliver you those articles that you originally wanted to read. So we read an academic paper about this that I'm going to link to in the show notes that goes in some depth into an economic model of is this really good for consumers? So we know about a quarter of consumers block ads. Those tend to actually be more sophisticated consumers, more technically minded consumers, maybe consumers of a more wealthy demographic. And so the amount of revenue that these publishers are losing as a result of the lost advertising is actually hitting their bottom lines. And that means they can't pay riders as well, can't employ as many riders. And evidence seems to show that that actually has been decreasing the quality of the content that they're putting out there. So you as a consumer, yeah, you're not seeing ads, but you're contributing to a decrease in content quality. So you have to ask yourself, is ad blocking really good or is there somewhere in between that might be ideal? Like. And I think we're going in the right direction as web browsers start to block some of the most egregious types of ads, as they have over time, and maybe there's a middle ground. I think there's other ways that as consumers, we can also fight against egregious ads. One thing is just not to endorse publishers who put them on their sites. When I go to a site that has awful ads, I usually don't go to it again. And if other people had that behavior too, I think that would make a difference. And of course some people do. But we need to be more clear about it. And you can even go a step further, let them know. Send them something on social media, hey, your ads are so bad. That's why I stopped going to your site. Send them an email so they know. We should also encourage browser makers to continue to implement technologies like pop up blocking and cross site tracking blocking that they've already done. I think they can go a lot further. For example, in Safari, and I believe in chrome as well, might be in Firefox. There's also the ability to just auto, not play sound when you go to a new site. So you open a new site, those autoplay videos are silent if they do autoplay.

Do you think ad blockers are ethical?

I think reasonable people can disagree on that. Personally, I think when you go to a website, there's kind of an implicit contract between you and the publisher that you're going to allow them to show you ads so that they get paid. Right? I don't want writers not getting paid as much. I don't want writers having to be laid off when I'm enjoying the content. So if I care enough about that content, because no one's forcing me to go to that content, right, it's not like I have to go to that website, but if I do choose to go to that website, then I want the people who created the content to be compensated for me enjoying that content. So a lot of times, websites are now offering premium subscription models. I'm willing to pay for that. Like, I pay for things to not see advertisements, and I'm happy to do that. But for websites that I'm not willing to pay for, if I go to them, I want the publisher to get some money for me going to it so that they get compensated for me seeing that content. Because I know as a content creator myself that it doesn't feel good when you, when someone tries to steal your stuff, and I'm not saying that using an ad blocker is exactly the same as stealing, but it is a way of avoiding compensating somebody for their content. And you might not be compensating monetarily, but you are compensating with your attention being slightly diverted by those advertisements. So personally, I'm against it. In general, I think, again, there's an implicit contract, hey, no one forced you to go to this website, but if you do that, we have these advertisements because that's how we get paid. And so I'm willing to be a party to that. Now, I think the most egregious advertisements, it's okay to block, because if they're going out of their way to kind of deceive you or to cause you to have other problems like send you malware or do a bunch of popups that you can't close, which again, for those of you that weren't alive in the late nineties or early oos are using the web at that time. That's what it could be like. They would send up so many pop ups, you couldn't close them all at once so that you couldn't not click on the advertisement. So I think that the kind of egregious behavior, it's absolutely fine to block. But at the same time, I think the regular idea just of a banner ad on a website when I'm reading an article, well, yeah, they need to get paid somehow if we want this stuff for free. I think what's going to happen if we have ad blocking become completely pervasive, which it doesn't look like it will be. It's been around for a long time and still only a quarter of people use it. But if it did become completely pervasive, everything would just have to be behind paid subscriptions. Right. So every website you go to, you'd have to pay a subscription. Otherwise, how would they create the content? Unless you want just AI generated garbage? So what do you think?

I mostly agree with you. I think that we are consumers of the Internet and be naive to think that the folks making these web pages aren't trying to make a profit in some way and need to in order to have good services, you know, good things to read and. But I also understand the wanting to have ad blockers or when there are ads that take up so much of the page you can barely get to the content that you want. That's really frustrating. And for me sometimes makeshi me think, like, oh, is this page sketchy? Like, is something bad going to happen here? Or something like, it doesn't feel comfortable? And then I do like you do. I avoid those pages. But I understand the desire and maybe sometimes the need for some folks to put the ad blockers in. But I also, I agree with you that we're consumers of something and we have access to so much information and so many cool things on the Internet that there's going to be ads and you feel really strongly about certain times or places where there shouldn't be ads. There's more and more opportunities to have those premium subscriptions or ad free memberships or whatever.

All right. Thanks for listening to us this week, Rebecca. How can people get in touch with us on x?

We're k o p e C e x p l a I n s.

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you soon. Bye.