#Ad-blockers have become vital for safe and privacy focused browsing. While there are ad-networks who follow good code of conduct and would only approve ads that don’t insert malicious scripts or track the users heavily, there are a lot of ad-networks who couldn’t care less as they are trying to make money.
I’ve been a professional blogger to understand how important it is for a publisher to include ads to sustainably continue to maintain the publication and to continue putting the efforts in publishing valuable content for the readers. Unfortunately, it’s sad that in the race to make money – these publishers forget the most crucial factor of a successful website and that is the reader’s experience. If reading the blog post is going to be a struggle and as a reader, I’ll see more ads than the content – chances are either I will figure out a way to avoid the ads or stop visiting your site.
That’s why I decided to implement Ad Block Plus on my browser to avoid getting bombarded with ads that I don’t want to see. To be considerate, I decided to allow Acceptable Ads program – as I don’t mind non-intrusive ads and ads from ethical ad-networks.
Life was good, until some publishers decided to counter-attack by showing popups that force you to disable the ad-blocker for their websites – some allowed to continue without disabling the ad-blocker, but not all. And even though the Ad Block Plus could zap these lightbox powered popups, it didn’t truly help as most of the time the scrolling ability was lost – so one couldn’t read the article properly.
My solution in this case was to remove Ad Block Plus in favor of uBlock Origin. Now, it not only blocks tracking scripts, stupid ads, it also blocks these ad-blocker blocking scripts as well!
Do you use ad-blockers? If yes – which one, do you prefer?