Debate Nirvana

Ad blockers starve many companies of revenue from ads, which is the way the majority of websites get their profit. Furthermore, they block revenue from websites that send out the ads. This can lead to sites having to use more intrusive ads, or start charging money from the users. We all have our favorite websites, and if you like a website that is driven by ad revenue, you are undermining their work by having Adblock turned on in your browser. These websites need ads so they can be free and helpful to the public. The internet is built on advertising. It’s the best revenue stream it currently has, and while it’s not ideal, people are doing all sorts of really clever things to make it more relevant, less intrusive and more useful both to advertisers and consumers. Except, that is, for the users who choose to exclude themselves from this economy and simply suck resources out of the internet using adblockers. According to the Washington Post,the 15% of US internet users with ad-blockers have cost advertising companies $22 billion dollars this year and a projected $35 billion by 2020 in revenue. You might say, “well these companies can just advertise elsewhere.”  But for small companies and websites, other forms of advertising are too expensive.  Billboards can cost over $230,000 in a year! This is significantly more placing an internet ad which can cost only 20 cents per view.  The tremendous loss of revenue created by Adblockers hits large companies as well.  A Facebook decision last year to create tamper-proof ads that can't be removed by ad-blockers is expected to yield an additional $720 million this year in advertisement revenue for the social media giant, according to the PageFair research analysis. Similarly, by blocking adblockers , Google made $887 million in lost ad revenue from Adblockers. The doomsday scenario for website publishers is that ad blocking becomes easier, more well known and regularly used. As we said, it is already estimated that companies will lose $22 billion this year and $35 billion by 2020.

When given the choice of a free internet with ads visible or an internet without ads that costs money to access, people are willing to see some ads to keep their favorite websites free. Surveys repeatedly show that upwards of 75% of consumers prefer ad-supported Internet sites where the content is free over ad-free sites where they would pay fees for content. Fewer than 10% of consumers want to pay for content. More than 90 percent of Americans polled by the Digital Advertising Administration said that free content was important to the overall value of the Internet, and more than 60 percent said it was “extremely” important. By driving digital publishers, including some of the most well-known news organizations in the world, to impose fees on consumers in order to continue to support their business and content-development objectives, the ad-block profiteers are ignoring the will of consumers like you and me.

Companies want consumers like you and me to use only their product. If there are ad blockers it makes it so that smaller website and app creators cannot keep up as they don’t earn any revenue. This hurts our economy as fewer new companies will succeed and it hurts the consumer because it severely  limits our choices.