The Ethics of AdBlock

The other day, I was browsing Digg and came upon WhyFirefoxIsBlocked.com. This site blocks Firefox users because of the prevalence of the AdBlock plugin, which, as the name implies, blocks ads and deprives sites of revenue, either directly in pay-per-click or pay-per-conversion arrangements or indirectly by lowering hit counts in pay-per-impression situations.

The site raised strong reactions from Digg users, who were almost universally opposed and had angry words (many of them misspelled) for the site’s creator. In a way, they ironically confirmed many of the arguments that the author makes in his article "Firefox – a New Religion."

The site raised the ethical question in my mind of who’s really at fault here: people depriving content creators from ad revenue, webmasters who monotize every pixel of screen space to the detriment of their content, or advertisers who create more and more obnoxious ads in an arms race for eyeballs?

I’ll explore each below the fold…

First, let’s look at the obvious black hats here: advertisers. Now, since this blog is for non-profits and since non-profits are often among those advertisers, you’re probably saying, "But I’m paying for those eyeballs – I should get noticed! And we’re not the bad guys here – we’re keeping these sites afloat while providing people opportunities to [get involved / make a donation / learn more about our work / complain about our ads]."

But if we look at it from a site visitor’s standpoint, online ads have become more and more obnoxious over the years – in particular the proliferation of flash has led to ads that dance around, hover over the text you’re trying to read, or flash at you in contrasting colors. The absolute worst are those that automatically start some video or audio without your input – these can be particularly annoying if you’re running through a social news site, middle-clicking everything that looks interesting to read at once, and suddenly, something starts making noise and you can’t find it to stop it.

How can advertisers stop being the villain here? It starts with not escalating the war for attention – this can only lead to the mutually assured destruction of ad blockers. A simple, well-written and designed static ad should be enough to sell your product – and if it’s not, maybe you’re advertising in the wrong place. Google adwords are the ideal here – they get plenty of clicks, despite a long list of rules that preclude obnoxious practices.

But even if advertisers are an easy target, one has to consider that without them, many sites would have to be paid content or find some other sponsor. And few advertisers want to annoy visitors – they just want your attention. It reminders me of my cat sitting on the part of a newspaper I’m trying to read. But just as my cat isn’t able to prioritize what I want to pay attention to, advertisers shouldn’t be expected to do so – just like the cat.

So what about site owners? They plastered ad space all over their sites at the expense of their content. They opened the door to flash ads and popups, and in some cases, they proactively approved every ad that went up (which isn’t to say they endorsed them, just that they didn’t reject them as being too annoying to their visitors).

What’s more, some of them made particularly ad-friendly choices at the expense of the reader. Tom’s Hardware Guide, one of my favorite places to research computer components, is particularly egregious in splitting articles into obscene numbers of pages to boost hit counts and get more mileage out of ad spaces. Other sites will post adsense blocks near other content, disguised as regular links, since they get paid per click, or will set pages to autorefresh to boost their traffic.

But running a website is expensive, particularly if you have to put a lot of time into creating content or have enough traffic to need a VPS or dedicated server, and that money has to come from somewhere. Some people have gone with paid content, but as I’ve argued in the past, this just isn’t a tenable model for most sites.

And let’s be honest: most site owners aren’t getting rich. Ads online are generally pretty cheap, unless you’re on a gigantic platform – while at Feingold, I recall doing a week-long blogad buy of every Democratic blog in Iowa. It cost a princely $250 (strangely, that’s actually gone down to $120 at the moment – see for yourself here).

Content creators need to balance the needs of their readers with their own need to monotize. Ask friends if they think your site emphasizes its content or looks like a NASCAR vehicle. Pick affiliate networks that let you have control over what ads you approve – then use that power wisely. Consider ways to make up to your advertisers for not letting them have prime real estate – like this post at MyDD thanking their sponsors, which also reminders your readers that they should consider buying an ad.

That just leaves site visitors. By turning on ad blocking software, it’s undeniable that they do deprive sites of revenue. And they break that unwritten social contract that governs most all advertising-based media – watch these ads and you can have this entertainment or information for free (thinking about it, this analogy holds true for TV, radio, and, newspapers, while billboards and their kin really don’t have a social contract besides "check out this ugly thing" – you don’t actually get anything in exchange).

And with other media, you generally have a choice – watch ads on TV or buy the DVD or TiVo. Listen to these ads on the radio or buy XM or a CD. With a few exceptions, like Slate, you generally don’t have a choice that lets you buy your way out of ads. So it could be argued that offering you a choice – "Watch these ads or don’t browse" doesn’t work with the free and open nature of the internet, so some users are turning the choice back to the advertiser: "Make your ads less annoying or I’ll just block them."

Web surfers also should consider whether those ads carry value. Sure, there’s really no reason for me not to block dancing mortgage guy or annoying MySpace ads of all stripes. But when an ad is carefully targetted, like with Google AdWords or the new Facebook social ads that Amy mentioned last week, there might be some value in what’s being advertised. You don’t have to click, or even read the whole thing, but at least take a glance to see if there’s anything to interest you.

Maybe it’s just that web ads haven’t yet reached the level of sophistication attained by other media – TV ads have become such an art form that I regularly get emails from Mac afficianados when they see a new Mac vs PC ad (when’s the one coming out PC guy just tells Mac guy to stop living in his parents’ basement and get a job, but that’s for another day…) and many of us watch the Super Bowl just for the ads (a task made easier by TiVo and the YouTube to cut out the football parts).

In the end, it looks like there’s plenty of blame to go around for the present ad vs adblock arms race. As a web surfer, I’ll admit that I downloaded IE7 Pro, an add-on that includes an adblocker and flash blocker, which I turn on when I’m on sites that are just out of control (though I also love the mouse gestures).

But there’s a difference between avoiding ads indiscriminately and selectively turning on the block when it gets excessive. Since ads are the price we pay for a largely free internet, I don’t mind seeing the occasional ad – I’ll click the "skip this" on an interrupt (by the way, the Times just added an interrupt from their RSS feed – the hard-to-find "skip" link is in grey in the upper-right. Ironically, here’s an older Times story about interrupt ads) and turn on my Google popup blocker, but I’ll also skim the paid results in a search and check out a static and unobtrusive ad for something interesting.

I don’t doubt that we’ll continue to see ad blocking technology be improved upon (though probably not integrated into IE, given how invested Microsoft is in online ads at the moment), as well as ads that work to subvert it. Advertisers need to reach viewers that are fast-forwarding through their Tivo and subscribing to Sirius, and many are turning to the web. Some of those are unscrupulous and obnoxious. A few content creators will post their ads. And people will do what they can to keep them from harming their browsing experience, with add-ons like AdBlock.

And that’s why Firefox is blocked.

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