Question

E-commerce Marketing and Advertising Concepts

Ad blockers provide an advertising-free Internet experience for users, but at what cost?

Case:

The rise of ad blockers has begun to make a dent in the advertising revenue earned by content creators and providers. Ad blockers identify and eliminate content based on its IP address, functioning much like a firewall. The most common ad blocker, AdBlock Plus, is offered as an extension to all major web browsers, and about 30% of Internet users currently use an ad blocker. AdBlock is free to use in its basic iteration, extremely simple, and highly efective, making it an online advertiser’s worst nightmare.

Ad blockers often make websites look nicer and more streamlined while reducing battery usage and data consumption. They also stop the tracking cookies that many Internet users find distasteful—advertisers use these to keep comprehensive information on you and your activities online. These are the benefits to web users. The drawbacks? If too many people use ad blockers, your favorite sites on the Internet won’t be able to provide the free content you enjoy most.

Many websites have begun making direct appeals to visitors to turn of their ad blockers, including Wired, The Guardian, and OKCupid. Others have dramatically altered the types of advertising they are willing to accept. However, the perception of advertising as an unwanted and unnecessary intrusion does not help these sites to change the way their visitors view ads.

Content consumers often forget that the free content they enjoy is actually paid for by advertising dollars. However, we haven’t explicitly agreed to this arrangement, or even been asked about it. Viewing advertising that doesn’t pertain to your interests feels like work during moments that are supposed to be leisure time, and most people bristle at the imposition. Advertisers hope that the ads you view will be about things you’d like to know more about, but it more often feels like ads are about things you aren’t interested in and that the advertisers want you to like against your will.

Answer these questions:

1. What is the “ethical ad blocker”?

2. Why are algorithmic advertising technologies increasingly important to advertisers?

3. Where do you stand on the use of ad blockers?

Answer 1

1) Ethical ad blocker is the solution for this ad problem so that both, the website developer and the user have a win-win like situation. If you use ethical ad blocker entire content in the web page will not ne shown. It just shows some ethics so that users understand that monetization of website is necessary in order to earn earn from the site. Daruis Kazemi developed the Ethical ad blocker. "The conundrum at hand: users don't want to see ads, but content providers can't give away content for free," is what he wants to say in context to this ad blocker. This ethical ad blocker is the real raw thinking, which authors need for their effort in making the content free for user without subscription but with the burdern of ads which helps them in earning. It's just the truth that nothing comes without a price to pay for.

2) Algorithimic advertising technologies is the technique to gather the information of the user, geographical location, and cultural aspects. The user's activity information through use of cookies with media and interests. This data helps in showing relevant ads to the user of his/her interest and also according to gender or age. The real time compatibilty of ads with the website is produced through the algorithm and statistically relevant ads are shown instead of showing ads which are not in the interest of the user. This reduces the redundancy of ads in a narrow , specific way to help the marketers and also becomes efficient for all the parties involved. These algorithms develop a target audience for the marketers able to reach more clients than the traditional ones because of similarities in the ads and the interest of the user. Advertisements should be such that the user doesn't consider it unworthy or out of context. It should seem like an info related to the content he is looking for. Therefore these algorithms help in a way much better than the traditional ways of advertising. But on the contrary to the benefits it also has some bad risks like privacy theft. This algorithm can access all the things that you surf on the internet with the ones that are ver personal to you. The algorithm should be like a boon rather than being a unwanted curse. Therefore ethics and neutrality must be followed while developing it. This is a challenging thing while keeping in mind the ability of the algorithm. European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was formed in 2018 for these ethical and security protocols to be followed by the algorithm. This is a new policy in keeping in mind the right to privacy and ethics for the algorithm.

3) In personal opinion on the ad blockers i don't have problem if website show me ads because it is a run for their money. Its just like giving something in return for the free content the websites provide us. However its also the responsibilty of the website developers to design in such a way that ads are not annoying. For ex. the ads must not open new tab while browsing. This might be a spam. All the media websites have ads on their pages. But most of them are in a systematic way. Also some websites show ads frequently, thats very disturbing. Also the amount of ads shown are also the factor to be in sight. N number of ads are a no-no. I don't want lengthy and slow loading web pages that have high media/images content which waste the internet data. Also the ad blocker may not be 100% safe to use. As in case of algorithms we saw above, the ad blocker may not follow ethics and send our data to the third parties. They might track your activities and may be a potential threat. Incase if this above scenarios i would use a ad blocker that is fair enough and filters out some unwanted images and which is safe.