The invasion of online advertising

Forget about spam and junk e-mail for it is now more or less under control. A worse nuisance is the invasion of online advertising, be it the ads that pop up everywhere on your screen or those that come on your smartphone in various forms and ways. The last four or six months have seen a clear increase of the otherwise old phenomenon.

Take YouTube for instance, for one. Since last August ads are not only “on the side”, but jump right in to pollute a significant size of the lower part of the video are you are watching. There’s always the little “x” you can click in the top right corner to close the ad but you still have to do it. Until another ad pops up again.

The vast majority of applications that you can install on your smartphone, Android models mainly, come free. That is until you realise that the actual price to pay is to allow ads in while you are using the application and that obscure part of the display, distracting you from whatever you may be doing. It is only then that you find that there’s an ad-free version of the same app but for which you have to pay, admittedly a very reasonable price, a nominal $2 to $10 in most cases. 

Let’s not forget Facebook. A couple of days ago I was looking for some software on Amazon. I just checked the specs and the price but didn’t buy. The next day, while I was Facebooking, there was a new window on my page, advertising the very software I was searching the day before on what was another site of course. Given that the product, Antares Autotune software to name it, is not what you would call a common staple that you would see advertised anywhere for the masses, the only explanation was that my browser had let Facebook dig into its cached info and had brought up the ad, linking what I did on Amazon with Facebook. So much going on behind our back!

You can always try to outsmart your web browser but there’s no guarantee things will be better. Many users opt for AdBlocker, a nice little application that plugs in Google Chrome browser. It’s free (genuinely), small and easy to install with Chrome. It does an excellent job at blocking a large number of ads. Unfortunately it blocks them so well that countless websites, which design strongly relies on ads, just won’t open at all once you install and activate AdBlocker. You find yourself deactivating AdBlocker to view these sites.

Do we have the right to complain? After all ads only come on sites that we visit without paying, with free Android applications, etc. Moreover, there are ads everywhere, in every space, on the street, in printed magazines, on TV, in stadiums, and so forth. Why do we hate ads on the Internet so much?

It’s probably because it is not as well regulated as on other traditional media. After all analogue advertising has been around since the beginning of the 20th century and as such is tightly regulated.

Just like many aspects of the Internet that are rather hard to control because of its gigantic global scale, online ads, often but not always, come in insidious, unpleasant ways. This is mainly what consumers dislike.

There’s a huge difference between a clean, discrete window that shows on the side of your screen, elegantly promoting say a watch model, not hiding any part of the information you came here for in the first place, and a treacherous ad that jumps right in the middle of the text you are reading and that says “click here to find the secret to weight loss that your dietician doesn’t want you to know about” and that doesn’t close easily.

There’s no solution for the nuisance now. Especially that thanks to online ads countless interesting sites can exist that otherwise cannot sustain the expense. Now to be able to filter out the unethical and insidious ads, keeping only the nice and clean ones is technically a mission impossible, at least with the current state of technology. Perhaps someone, some genius teenager maybe, one day will come up with an app for that. An ad-free app, of course.