Detractors call them a protection racket but who stands to gain and lose?
John E Dunn March 3, 2016http://cdn1.computerworlduk.com/cmsdata/features/3636180/adblock_istock_kagenmi_thumb800.jpg
Adblocking tools have turned into the feared gatekeepers of web advertising
Today, browsing adblockers sit plumb in the middle of an increasingly tense online stand-off between software firms, online advertisers and the web publishing industry which makes it hard to imagine their innocuous beginnings in the early 2000s.
Marketed for years by a cottage industry of coders, adblockers were just another browser utility, one of many users could choose from for all sorts off tasks. Most users didn’t use them or hadn’t even heard of them. From the outside, it was never clear whether they worked or were even particularly necessary.
Five or six years ago, something changed, although not everyone noticed at the time. Publishers with under-pressure business models started allowing more intrusive ads that splashed pop-ups, consumed bandwidth and made browsing online content more time-consuming. The clutter of third-party platforms serving these ads started out-doing each other in their attempts to attract, track and even follow users in order to target them using programmatic advertising.
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