Age of the Geek

After these messages
     The world runs on advertising.
     Not just newspapers, though I greatly appreciate our advertisers and the money that allows us to sell these papers at such reasonable subscription rates (renew today!). Pretty much anything that lots of people will look at inevitably ends up the target of advertisers. Billboards, bus stations, I hear there are even commercials on television.
     And when Wells Fargo isn't busy committing fraud and identity theft on their customers, they're dumping millions of dollars to have sports stadiums named after them.
     How much of our world runs on advertising? Consider this. Adblock Plus is selling ads to be shown through their software that, as its name implies, is supposed to block ads.
     Recently the company launched an extension of its "Acceptable Ads Platform," which allows websites to purchase advertisements from a pre-selected whitelist. Users with the Adblock Plus extension (who opt to have the whitelist turned on) will see those pre-selected ads upon visiting that particular site.
     The "Acceptable Ads Platform" has been around for a while, but Adblock Plus's new service creates a new marketplace that streamlines the whitelisting process.
     Everything about this situation is weird, starting with the Adblock Plus business model.
     Step 1. Give away free software to millions of internet users that don't want to deal with ads.
     Step 2. Sell ads to those users.
     In a way it makes a kind of sense. Adblock Plus users aren't their customers, they are the product. By establishing a user base, they've effectively secured the exclusive ability to advertise to a massive number of people. Advertisers have no option but to go through them.
     If that seems morally shady, that's because it is.
     Let's make no bones about it. This is a hair's width away from straight up extortion. "Oh hey, nice website you've got here. Sure would be a shame if we gave tools to millions of people to visit your site without seeing your ads. But hey, if you pay us a little bit, we'll let people see your ads."
     It's like a war profiteer selling body armor to one side of a conflict and armor piercing bullets to the other.
     That said, Adblock Plus becoming a self-proclaimed gatekeeper for advertising might still be the best outcome for everybody.
     Adblocking software didn't just happen. It was a reaction to increasingly intrusive advertising practices. Gaudy ads that distracted from the content, elaborate animated that hogged memory and processing resources, full-screen overlays with miniscule close buttons forcing their way between you and the webpage you're trying to look at. To say nothing of intrusive and unwelcome video, pop-ups, and ads that tracked your web browsing habits.
     Advertising companies proved incapable of restraining themselves in their ever escalating efforts for our attention. For millions of people, myself included, the willingness to support websites with our clicks became outweighed by an unwillingness to deal with the toxic environment that out of control ads created.
     This has created an all-or-nothing situation when it comes to advertising. Sure, there are plenty of people out there simply unwilling to accept ads under any circumstance. Those people are selfishly entitled and should feel shame if they are capable of it.
     Plenty of others don't have a problem with the idea of advertising, it's the execution that's turned them off. Whitelisting is a feature in most adblocking software, but that requires to manually opt in to every site. It's something most people don't have inclination to do.
     I feel a twang of guilt when I realize that I've forgotten to turn off adblocking on sites that have earned the fraction of a penny that my views are intended to provide, but the bad doesn't outweigh the good. If advertisers could be trusted to not go overboard, we wouldn't have this issue. If websites could figure out a way to monetize without ads, we wouldn't have this issue.
     Neither is likely to happen. Adblock Plus setting themselves up as a middle man is not ideal, but it may be a necessary compromise between terrible ads and no ads at all.
 
     Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and guarantees your newspaper isn't tracking you.