This is why I use Adblock. So stop asking me to turn it off.

First off, you’re a site that covers Denver. I live in Southern California. I doubt I’ll find any ads that are going to be relevant to me, unless I fancy making a 15-hour, 1,000 mile drive to buy a bagel. I would never even have visited your site until I happened to read a comment on Reddit recommending a story on your site (and it must be said, the story was excellent). And when I click that link, I’m asked to switch off AdBlock because you want to load 213 ads? And no, I’m not picking on you specifically. I just could not believe you wanted to load more than 200 ads onto a single page.

Adblocking is something websites brought upon themselves. They decided that intrusive and annoying popups were a good idea. They decided that Flash ads that cover most of the screen and sit there for 15 seconds with no way to close them were a good idea. They decided that obnoxious autoplay videos were a good idea. They decided that putting a thousand lines of tracking scripts at the top of their pages was a good idea. They decided that deliberately designing sites so ads load first and the content a distant second was a good idea.

Their thinking seemed to be that making their state-of-the-art website as slow, buggy and as much of a chore to visit as a GIF-laden AOL page from 1998 was a small price to pay in order to increase ad revenue. They are seemingly oblivious to the fact that, just as people don’t buy newspapers to look at ads, people don’t visit websites to look at ads. And they certainly don’t visit websites to have their hard drive filled with what amounts to corporate spyware.

And this is just on a desktop PC. On mobile, where a user could well be paying by the megabyte for data, it’s even worse. As this excellent New York times article points out, “We estimated that on an average American cell data plan, each megabyte downloaded over a cell network costs about a penny. Visiting the home page of Boston.com every day for a month would cost the equivalent of about $9.50 in data usage just for the ads.” The NYT tested several other news sites and came to the conclusion that adblocking is pretty much inevitable thanks to the actions of the companies that are complaining about adblocking.

And the best bit? After making their sites so shit to visit that users are basically forced to install a plugin to make them usable again, what do they do? They guilt-trip their users. “We see you’re using an adblocker. We rely on advertising revenue to exist. If you don’t disable adblocking we won’t make any money.”

Oh cry me a fucking river. No one has to tell me about how falling ad revenue is killing media; I work in community newspapers and have first-hand experience of seeing colleagues being laid off or not being replaced after leaving, the page counts of our papers plummeting and newsrooms losing the resources we need to actually do our bloody jobs. And it’s not like we went out of our way to piss off our readers by slapping ads over the content. 

So don’t whine to me about my use of an adblocker. You took a decision to put content — and therefore users — second to advertising, you can put up with the consequences. Instead of moaning about adblocking, look at the reasons why people use it... and hurry up because that figure is estimated to hit 30% of web users this year.