Advertising is becoming more and more pervasive on websites. Solutions like Adblock Plus have appeared to make it disappear from your browser.
The number of users who have installed an ad blocker is exploding. 62% of Internet users in Germany and 33% in France use one. And this is no coincidence — pop-up video, advertising that appears suddenly between two paragraphs, banners in every corner. We sometimes wonder where the real editorial content is, surrounded by advertising. If you have had enough, there are solutions to remove advertising, and these are ad blockers.
What is Adblocker?
These ad blockers, in the form of an extension, are easy to install on your browser. They also make it possible to rest your poor web browser, which must support increasingly heavy pages, sometimes even, especially on Firefox, to crash the browser altogether.
Popular Ad Blockers
- uBlock: lightweight and straightforward, it will make your browser much faster and ad-free.
- Adblock
- Ghostery: the little blue ghost is cleaning up your browser. It can detect all scripts for advertising and to no longer be tracked. No traces and no more advertising.
- Adblock Plus, the most famous: Adblock Plus is by far the most used adblocker. Very useful, it cleans your browser of all ads, even those on Facebook or YouTube. Even the “integrated” advertising campaigns that are the most entertaining for navigation are not forgotten. Adblock Plus offers an extension for the main web browsers.
- Adguard
How Do Ad blockers work?
The ad blocking software analyzes the source code of the page before it is displayed and detects tags and scripts of major advertising agencies and removes the portion of the system concerned. They can also be useful in some cases to speed up browsing and save bandwidth by eliminating the download of advertising content (often composed of images).
Are all Ads Blocked?
Not all ads are blocked. For example, with Adblock Plus, “honest and discreet advertising” remains visible by default, according to the ad blocker designers.
For instance, Adblock Plus announced that the essential Critéo advertising platform was being put on a “white list.” This means that all ads from Criteo will appear on websites even if Adblock Plus is active. Critéo joins other companies such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Taboola, Outbrain, who have paid Adblock Plus not to be blocked.
From then on, Adblock Plus became more and more of a sieve in the face of advertising.
Some publishers openly criticize the practices of ad blockers and in fact, accuse them of blackmail by offering advertisers the possibility of being visible despite the activated ad blocker if, in return, they pay them money.
Why are there so many online advertisements on the internet?
Many websites, especially news websites, are mainly financed through advertising. But here it is, online advertising is not very expensive compared to the number of people who see it. This is a real problem for content publishers.
To continue to earn money, they then try to increase their audience even more, even if it means publishing content that is not always of high quality but that attracts a mass audience (why do you think you see so many cat videos).
The other solution for publishers is to increase the number of advertising spaces that, little by little, invade a large part of the page. These ads are becoming more and more aggressive for users with, for example, video pop-ups that must be watched to access the content.
In short, too much advertising kills the ad, and users are fed up. This is why advertising blockers are increasingly being installed on browsers.
How does Ad blocker Protect your Online Privacy?
Ad blockers are tools specifically designed to protect tracking technologies that allow advertising companies to recognize and analyze users’ behavior across multiple websites without the user’s consent.
- A delightful side effect: It blocks a lot of annoying advertisements (because most of them work with tracking technologies) and also tracking scripts, which in turn leads to shorter loading times.
However, not all ad blockers are the same. Ad blockers like Adblock plus, Ghostery, or Disconnect work with a whitelist, which means some ads are not blocked.
A good ad blocker doesn’t work with blacklists or similar measures – it analyzes the behavior of websites much more; if it detects a tracking behavior, cookies, scripts, etc., it blocks them immediately, and you are protected.
- Detects fingerprinting
A significant advantage of ad blockers is that they can even detect and block tracking via fingerprinting (how this works exactly is not revealed).
- No configuration necessary
It is also convenient that ad blockers have to be installed as a plugin in web browsers – otherwise, no configuration is required. You can define individual exceptions – but this is only necessary if a website has display problems due to the tool.
- No business model
A central advantage of the ad blockers is that there is no commercial business model behind it. The tool is entirely free – useful, others are, too, but some AdBlockers like AdBlock Plus have been criticized for not blocking “acceptable” advertisements. That is advertisements from companies that have to pay for this activation (such as Google for AdWords ads).
- Available free of charge for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera
Currently, ad blockers are available for browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer or Edge. It is installed as a plug-in or extension with just a few mouse clicks (via the respective store of the web browsers).
Bottom Line
Ad blockers may work well in blocking the most annoying ads and tracking scripts; however, you can easily evade targeted advertisements by using a VPN service provider. For instance, Google, Facebook, and other top online services use your online data to serve targeted advertisements to you.
With a top VPN service provider such as RitaVPN, you can mask your online activity and escape the annoying ads tailored towards your Google searches.
