Advertising is an everyday fact of life on the internet, but more and more users are using
ad blocking software to evade seeing them at all.
From the perspective of a web publisher, you can probably understand the concern over this
growth of ad-blocking. Websites reliant on advertising revenue are
increasingly starting to lock out users who choose to use ad blockers, such as the Washington Post, and more recently, Forbes.
A free internet?
The vast majority of websites are free, and rely on revenue from advertising to survive. Just
asking users to disable ad-blockers has proven to be rarely successful, and profitable subscription only services are few and far between.
Forbes recently deployed this ‘please disable your ad blocker to proceed’ tactic for anyone wishing to read articles on its site. In an unfortunate twist for Forbes, however users who did this were then almost immediately stung with dangerous advertising malware ‘pop-unders.’
