A little rant on ads

DISCLAIMER: This is an opinion and you do not have to agree with it necessarily. That is why this is my blog, for write an opinion even if it is about a controversial topic.

This post came on my mind because I saw on reddit that Facebook will try to send ads out of the social network and How Facebook and Google are beating ad blockers. There is other news but I am sure you can find it at reddit. Also you have /r/Adblock, FYI.

I am sure you know that nowadays a big business is on online ads. You can see it because Google, Facebook, et al, put a lot of efforts in order to include ads on their websites (personalized or not, that will come on this post). I am sure you hate that too.

Well, the worst part of putting ads on a website is that you even can get malware if you are not careful what you click on. The good part is you get a revenue for forcing people to see your damn ads putting JS scripts that block the site if you do not deactivate the adblocker or putting messages like “This website can be possible because of the ads, please deactivate your adblocker”, yay! (Forbes is one of them putting a first-ad-page when you go into its website).

The fact is that I am not against ads. It as a part of the marketing strategy of a business and sure a company needs it for growing up. That is not enterily true, but for most of them, it is. There is a lot of companies that invest a lot of money in advertising and their own advertising because it is their bussines model. What it gets me anger is the huge amount of ads that invade TV and internet.

You turn on your TV, and I am sure you get an ad in the middle of whatever you are going to watch. You go into a newspapper or YouTube, and more ads! Really? Because I do not want to get to the point that you see more ads than a movie or a soup.

You install a free app from the Play Store or the AppStore, and BUM! More ads! And that ads are worst than the TV or website, because you can press onto them without wanting to do that!

So adblockers were born. The king was AdBlock Plus, but then uBlock went into the battlefield (use it, not the first). And then you can see a website without an ad bothering you at the left or right of the page, blinking with their colorful images (or even sound when ads were done with Flash). You can also block on Android with Adaway, but you have to be root :(.

And then, trackers’ blockers were born too! Because ads track people to know their preferences and then show personalized ads based on that. On a mobile platform ads track too.

And after that, internet collapses. For Duck’s sake!

After this little rage against ads, I have to say that I am against of tracking users, putting malware on the ads and that kind of stuff. One ad on TV or website is cool, even people will be considering not blocking them. On a mobile platform it gets data (woo, data, pls, it has to be paid every month and is loved by each one of ours) and that is the bad face of it.

If Facebook or Google would not based their bussines model on that (a part of selling data and that kind of stuff), and the Internet would not get that huge amount of ads, people would not block them. Buuuuuuut they wanted to play, so… :)

I am sorry, I am not going to support it. It bothers me that watching a video or reading some articles and then a wild ad appeared…