Ad blockers have been around for several years with all of them having the same purpose: to block adverts from loading and appearing on websites. The main reason people adopted ad blockers could be seen as a grey area. Some people generally don’t like adverts others while others hate the constant pop-ups that some websites produce when trying to generate revenue quick. With this in mind, here are the main reasons why people are still using ad blockers in 2017.

#1 Pop-up Adverts

Although briefly mentioned above, this is by far the biggest reason why people still use ad blockers. Programs such as Google Adsense/Adwords works around providing an advertising platform that is aimed at improving the web user’s experience, which is generally why the Adsense code of conduct is so strict as to how adverts are to be shown, where and in what manner.

Pop-up adverts diconnect web users from the content on the website and can only be described as intrusive, since they are blocking your path to your content. Google puts pop-up adverts quite nicely in their advertising policy:

Google does not allow any kind of pop-up adverts of any kind on our site. We find them annoying.

#2 Disruptive Adverts

There seems to be a transition away from adverts appearing as standard text and images to rich media adverts, which contain some form of interaction or video for the web user to watch. With adverts that contain video, you can bet they will have sound with them too. Unfortunately, this does mean that these adverts play even when web users are not engaged with the advert, ruining the web user’s experience of browsing the web. Adverts are only meant to engage with the web user once it has been made clear that the web user wants to engage with the advert and not the other way around.

#3 Ad Blockers Decrease Loading Times

The vast majority of the advertising you see on the web use some sort of <script>, which is quite data consuming when it comes to the loading of a website. Pay per click advertising, for example, needs to award the advertising space to the highest bidder advertiser and then load the content of that advertiser into the advertising space. This all takes valuable time when it comes to loading a website with adverts on it. For this reason, ad blockers effectively prevent any part of the advert from loading, which will mean websites will load quicker for those with an ad blocker installed.

Ultimately, it is a shame that such an article is being produced because it goes to show that advertising online is not by any means perfect yet – people still get annoyed by adverts be them intrusive, disruptive or time consuming. However, it will be interesting to see how the internet counteracts ad blockers in the future. For example, some websites will hide content unless ad blockers are disabled on the site – will more websites do this in the future?