Is it ethical to block adverts online?
Found on BBC News on Thursday, 05 December 2013
Adblock Plus, the most popular adblocking program on the market, has been downloaded 250 million times, and has around 60 million active users.
"Advertising has become even more aggressive," says Sean Blanchfield, chief executive of Pagefair, a firm that monitors how often advertising is blocked on websites.
The question is not if it's ethical to block ads, but why there is such a big demand for addons like Adblock Plus or Ghostery. Most users would not care to add them if advertising wasn't so annoying. Flashy animations, autoplaying videos, blinking graphics or hovering ads while you read a website, not to mention popups and profiling by aggressively tracking visitors: the advertising business has angered the users and often the ads need more bandwidth than the site itself. That's why people use those plugins.