Ads Be Gone: How Adblockers Work

If you’ve been on the internet at all, you’ve seen ads. At the start of that funny cat video on YouTube that you wanted to show your coworker, on the top and sides of the news article you were reading, or the first results when you search for something on Google. All of these are ads. As the Internet has evolved, it has become more and more clear that companies are able to make money by advertising to people who were just browsing the internet. And there is no doubt these ads can be annoying. Some people just want to enjoy their cat videos in peace without having a commercial for a car or the latest blockbuster blaring at them. For people who wanted an internet free of obvious corporate advertisement, the choice was obvious: use an Adblock.

So how does an adblocker work? Think of it this way, when you click on a website, a request is sent to the server that hosts that site. The website is then sent to your computer. Adblock, in the simplest of terms, intercepts the website and eliminates parts of the website that contain advertisements as well as stopping scripts associated with the more annoying parts of advertisements from running in the first place. These would be the pop-ups outside of your browser window and other advertisements that contain video that starts to play as soon as you access the site. Basically, adblockers are self-explanitory: they block ads from showing at all. 

That’s all well and good, but how do you even get an adblocker in the first place? It’s not something that browsers come with, and there’s probably a reason for that. But not to worry. If you want an adblocker, it’s as easy as quickly searching "adblocker" online, and you’ll find a whole host of options. Most of them are perfectly safe and come in quick, tiny little downloads for whatever browser you are using, be it Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or, for some reason, Internet Explorer. After that, it's as simple as installing the browser extension and you’re off! A wonderful Internet free of ads awaits you!

Except, like most things in life, it’s not that simple. Ads didn’t come onto the internet just for the sake of making the experience worse for everyone. Some people may not know this, but building, designing, and hosting a website has serious costs. Every time a user comes to the site to read news stories, look at funny pictures of cats or download things, it costs the owner of that website money in bandwidth costs. One of the ways that website owners cover these bandwidth costs is through the revenue generated by ads on the website. These ads pay the website owner for the amount of times a user ends up clicking on the ad or simply for getting users to look at the ads itself, even if they don’t end up clicking on it. While these costs are usually very small on a per-person basis, if the site gets very popular and a large portion of the people coming to visit are using an adblocker, that is potentially a lot of lost revenue.

One area of the internet where the morality of Adblock is an incredibly divisive topic is on YouTube. The video streaming service places ads in front of videos, and most of the time they are skippable after five seconds. If a user comes to YouTube to watch a video and they are running adblock though, no ad is shown before the video. The problem, in the minds of some, is that then the content creator gets no money for the view. That's income out the door, for a lot of people. 

This is a problem a lot of sites have been having; users coming to their sites with adblockers turned on, using the services of the site, costing the site money, and the website getting nothing in return. Some sites have tried to pacify and educate their users with simple messages about the effects of adblockers and asking the user to turn them off, while other sites have tried simply not working with an adblocker enabled. In response, the programmers who make adblockers try to get around that and tout their adblocker as the best. It’s a cycle that continues to escalate with no end in sight.

For those of you who are wondering about the legality of adblockers, they are in a gray area. Adblockers are new enough to really not have much written about them in court. In April 2015, a German court ruled that they were legal, but no US court has taken a position either way. But there’s no fear of an ISP going after someone for using an adblocker in a similar way that they might go after someone for downloading and sharing a movie because adblockers aren't specifically illegal yet either.

With all that said, there are some legitimate reasons to use adblocker, including the ability to protect your computer from viruses. People who don’t stray off Facebook, Youtube, and the like don’t really have much to worry about in terms of malicious viruses and software. But for anyone that explores the web to its fullest, an adblocker is almost necessary to keep away malware designed to look like download buttons. And malicious ads aren’t just an issue for people downloading things from shady sites with ads for Russian mail-order-brides. Earlier this year, when users went to the Forbes website, they were greeted with a request to turn off their adblocker in order to read the article and when they did, they were immediately exposed to pop-ups containing malware. When something like that can happen on a major website such as Forbes, it only gives credence to the line that "the best anti-virus that exists is an adblocker." I think most people are willing to give money to content creators, but not at the risk of exposing themselves to viruses and malware. 

If you have been reading this without an adblocker and want to try it out, there are three completely safe tools you should look into.

The first is Adblock and Adblock Plus. They are essentially the same tool and are among the most popular adblocking software out there, most likely because of the name. They will get the job done, though controversy has come up around Adblock Plus because of allegations that if companies pay Adblock, they are allowed to be whitelisted, essentially allowing their ads through the barrier.

If you want no ads ever getting through, uBlock Origin is the tool for you. This tool is very easy to download and install, and once it’s in, you never have to worry about advertisements again.

And lastly, we have an up-and-coming adblocker by the name of AdGuard. This tool is newer than the other two and, while not as tested for things like resource consumption and potential whitelisting, the makers of AdGuard claim that it only uses about half the memory of AdBlock Plus and that it stops Anti-AdBlocking software, something that uBlock and Adblock Plus currently can’t do.

The debate over adblocking is sure to rage as long as there are people trying to make money. And as long as there are hackers out there trying to insert viruses and malware into ads, there will be perfectly valid reasons to run adblockers. There is no easy answer to this question. Ads are necessary for companies to make income, but they can also contain harmful viruses. Adblock has become part of the discussion when companies try to make money on the internet and, at the end of the day, if you as an individual are really concerned with content creators being paid for their work, there are ways to get money to them without putting your own computer at risk.

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