Ad blocking
Ad blocking is a software capability for blocking or altering online advertising in a web browser, an application or a network. This may be done using browser extensions or other methods, such as browsers with inside blocking.
History
The first ad blocker was Internet Fast Forward, a plugin for the Netscape Navigator browser, developed by PrivNet and released in 1996. The AdBlock extension for Firefox was developed in 2002, with Adblock Plus being released in 2006. uBlock Origin, originally called "uBlock", was first released in 2014.Technologies and native countermeasures
Online advertising exists in a variety of forms, including web banners, pictures, animations, embedded audio and video, text, or pop-up windows, and can even employ audio and video autoplay. Many browsers offer some ways to remove or alter advertisements: either by targeting technologies that are used to deliver ads, targeting URLs that are the source of ads, or targeting behaviors characteristic of ads.Prevalence
Use of mobile and desktop ad blocking software designed to remove traditional advertising grew by 41% worldwide and by 48% in the U.S. between Q2 2014 and Q2 2015. As of Q2, 45 million Americans were using ad blockers. In a survey research study released Q2 2016, Met Facts reported 72 million Americans, 12.8 million adults in the UK, and 13.2 million adults in France were using ad blockers on their PCs, smartphones, or tablet computers. In March 2016, the Internet Advertising Bureau reported that UK ad blocking was already at 22% among people over 18 years old., 27% of US Internet users used ad blocking software, a trend that has been increasing since 2014.
Among technical audiences the rate of blocking reached 58% as of.
Benefits
For users, benefits of ad blocking software include quicker loading and cleaner looking web pages with fewer distractions, protection from malvertising, stopping intrusive actions from ads, reducing the amount of data downloaded by the user, lower power consumption, privacy benefits gained through the exclusion of web tracking, and preventing undesirable websites from making ad revenue out of the user's visit.Publishers and their representative trade bodies, on the other hand, argue that web ads generate revenue for website owners, enabling them to create or purchase content for their sites. They also contend that the widespread use of ad-blocking software and devices could negatively impact website owners’ revenue.
User experience
Ad blocking software may have other benefits to users' quality of life, as it decreases Internet users' exposure to advertising and marketing industries, which promote the purchase of numerous consumer products and services that are potentially harmful or unhealthy and on creating the urge to buy immediately. The average person sees more than 5000 advertisements daily, many of which are from online sources.Unwanted advertising can also harm the advertisers themselves if users become annoyed by the ads. Irritated users might make a conscious effort to avoid the goods and services of firms that are using annoying “pop-up” ads that block the Web content the user is trying to view. For users not interested in making purchases, the blocking of ads can also save time. Any ad that appears on a website exerts a toll on the user's "attention budget" since each ad enters the user's field of view and must either be consciously ignored or closed, or dealt with in some other way. A user who is strongly focused solely on reading the content they are seeking likely has no desire to be diverted by advertisements that seek to sell unneeded or unwanted goods and services. In contrast, users who are actively seeking items to purchase might appreciate advertising, in particular targeted ads.
Security
Another important aspect is improving security; online advertising subjects users to a higher risk of infecting their devices with computer viruses than surfing pornography websites. In a high-profile case, the malware was distributed through advertisements provided to YouTube by a malicious customer of Google's DoubleClick. In August 2015, a 0-day exploit in the Firefox browser was discovered in an advertisement on a website. When Forbes required users to disable ad blocking before viewing their website, those users were immediately served with pop-under malware. The Australian Signals Directorate recommends individuals and organizations block advertisements to improve their information security posture and mitigate potential malvertising attacks and machine compromise. The information security firm Webroot also notes employing ad blockers provides effective countermeasures against malvertising campaigns for less technically sophisticated computer users. Ad blocking is recommended by the FBI to prevent online scams.Monetary
Ad blocking reduces page load time and saves bandwidth for the users. Users who pay for total transferred bandwidth, including most mobile users worldwide, have a direct financial benefit from filtering an ad before it is loaded. Using an ad blocker is a common method of improving internet speeds. Analysis of the 200 most popular news sites in 2015 showed that Mozilla Firefox Tracking Protection led to a 39% reduction in data usage and a 44% median reduction in page load time. According to research performed by The New York Times, ad blockers reduced data consumption and sped upload time by more than half on 50 news sites, including The New York Times itself. Journalists concluded that "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".It is a known problem with most web browsers, including Firefox, that restoring sessions often plays multiple embedded ads at once. However, this annoyance can easily be averted simply by setting the web browser to clear all cookies and browsing-history information each time the browser software is closed. Another preventive option is to use a script blocker, which enables the user to disable all scripts and then to selectively re-enable certain scripts as desired, in order to determine the role of each script. The user thus can very quickly learn which scripts are truly necessary and consequently which sources of scripts are undesirable, and this insight is helpful in visiting other websites in general. Thus by precisely controlling which scripts are run in each webpage viewed, the user retains full control over what happens on their computer CPU and computer screen.
Methods
One method of filtering is simply to block Flash animations or image loading or Microsoft Windows audio and video files. This can be done in most browsers easily and also improves security and privacy. This crude technological method is refined by numerous browser extensions. Every web browser handles this task differently, but, in general, one alters the options, preferences or application extensions to filter specific media types. An additional add-on is usually required to differentiate between ads and non-ads using the same technology, or between wanted and unwanted ads or behaviors.Some browsers include built-in controls to block unsolicited pop-up windows as part of their content-blocking features. For example, Brave exposes a setting to block pop-ups in its privacy and security options.
The more advanced ad-blocking filter software allows fine-grained control of advertisements through features such as blacklists, whitelists, and regular expression filters. Certain security features also have the effect of disabling some ads. Some antivirus software can act as an ad blocker. Filtering by intermediaries such as Internet service providers or national governments is increasingly common.
Browser integration
, many web browsers block unsolicited pop-up ads automatically. Current versions of Konqueror, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox also include content filtering support out-of-the-box. Content filtering can be added to Firefox, Chromium-based browsers, Opera, Safari, and other browsers with extensions such as AdBlock, Adblock Plus, and uBlock Origin, and a number of sources provide regularly updated filter lists. Adblock Plus is included in the freeware browser Maxthon from the People's Republic of China by default.Another method for filtering advertisements uses Cascading Style Sheets rules to hide specific HTML and XHTML elements. This was once handled directly by a browser's user style sheet and custom CSS files. The CSS files employed regular expressions to describe a general advertisement profile. An example CSS selector from the once popular Floppy Moose style sheet is below. It simply hides anything with a link containing the characters "ad."
Stylesheets are still used to block ads today. However they are almost always used by an ad-blocking extension that combines CSS with other techniques. AdBlock Plus syntax includes CSS selectors which they call "element hiding" rules. The newer uBlock Origin even allows "cosmetic filters" which inject custom CSS declarations. Due to changes in advertising techniques, modern ad-blockers use more specific selectors, more frequently updated selectors, and a greater quantity of selectors. For example, the Floppy Moose style sheet originally contained 40 lines of CSS. In 2022, Easylist contains thousands of CSS selectors. In contrast to the general example above, below is one of the many specific CSS selectors from Easylist.
In January 2016, Brave, a free, ad-blocking browser for Mac, PC, Android, and iOS devices was launched. Brave users can optionally enable Brave's own ad network to earn Basic Attention Tokens, a type of cryptocurrency, which can be sent as micro-payments to publishers.
At the beginning of 2018, Google confirmed that the built-in ad blocker for the Chrome/Chromium browsers would go live on 15 February: this ad blocker only blocks certain ads as specified by the Better Ads Standard. This built-in ad blocking mechanism is disputed because it could unfairly benefit Google's advertising itself.
In 2019, both Apple and Google began to make changes to their web browsers' extension systems which encourage the use of declarative content blocking using pre-determined filters processed by the web browser, rather than filters processed at runtime by the extension. Both vendors have imposed limits on the number of entries that may be included in these lists, which have led to allegations that these changes are being made to inhibit the effectiveness of ad blockers.