Is Online Advertising Encouraging Ad Blockers?

It’s a 100% true that without advertising, many many businesses will be much worse off and lots of consumers would not have found the product he or she would have bought from advertising. Advertising is everywhere and, on a daily basis, we look at and engage with many different forms of it. I published an article last year describing how I thought ad blockers were ruining PPC. This is because ad blockers prevent any adverts from being shown preventing advertisers from gaining contextual traffic (and, in the end, they may be getting less relevant traffic because of it). However, what I did not say in the article was what was the main cause of people running ad blocker plug ins/add ons. 
 
I can see in the past why people run ad blockers. We have all come across adverts that claim we are the 1,000,000th winner and there is a prize to be awarded because of this. We have also come across countless pop-up adverts that appear out of nowhere: these adverts are annoying and deserve to be blocked.
 
However, I feel that online advertising, the good contextual advertising, has maybe gone a step to far when it comes to advertising to consumers. It is unhealthy to see advertising everywhere and from my perspective, it feels like we are getting to a stage like George Orwell’s 1984 where whatever we do, we are being monitored so that relevant adverts can be shown to us at the majority of times. Here are some examples of what I am talking about:

• Adverts in Gmail and Gmail for mobile – I am mistaken on a daily basis of what emails I have unread considering that in most cases, there is an extra email that looks to be unread but ends up being an advertising email. Many people are very defensive over who they share their email with so that their email is not dominated by email marketing. However, even if you don’t share your email to anyone, email marketing will still happen to you now.
• Multiple Sources Of Advertising – It is true that and Adsense go hand in hand with each other when it comes to monetising a website. However, when a website displays three of the largest Adsense adverts, multiple BuySellAds adverts and even Infolinks in-text advertising, that is when it has gone to far. As well as slowing the page loading time down too, it will also cause great frustration to the web user the number of adverts being displayed to him or her at once.
• ‘Download’ Adverts – A great part to PPC is that it chooses the most relevant adverts to the contents on the website. This is a benefit in most cases except for the times when you are on a website where you are downloading some sort of file such as software. If the website chooses to run Adsense adverts on the same page, you will find adverts that appear as a large download button, tricking you into a cheap click. This is not what PPC is about.

On the whole, PPC is amazing. However, there a few ‘loop holes’ in the system which I feel are contributing to people running ad blockers.