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TO BLOCK OR NOT TO BLOCK
For those of us still using dial-up modems to access the Internet, speed is a precious commodity. If you’re like me, you try to go online when traffic is light and a good connection to your Internet service provider is available to help load Web pages quickly.

Pages that are jammed with banner advertisements can be particularly irksome as you watch the ads being loaded line by frustrating line before the content you’re actually seeking appears. Yet ads are everywhere on the Internet, including the Association’s Web site, ADA.org. What’s a Web surfer with a 56 kilobites-per-second speed limit to do?

Enter the ad blocker.

These Web browser plug-ins can block the downloading and display of many types of advertisements, speeding up access and eliminating clutter on Web pages. Many of the programs also offer utilities for managing cookies and Web bugs. Cookies are small software files that, among other things, can be used to track Web surfing habits, while Web bugs are placed on pages to monitor a site’s visitors.

Several makers of ad-blocking software have said their products soon will be bundled with hardware, including modems, wireless devices and even personal computers from major manufacturers. As it is, personal-use versions of most of the programs can be downloaded free of charge from the maker.

Blocking ads and speeding access times sounds great, but there could be a downside. If we all start blocking ads and Web site advertising revenues plummet as a result, how many sites will be able to continue offering the wide variety of free content to which we’ve grown accustomed?

Commercial Web sites are meant to be money-making ventures. The content and services they give away—news, search utilities, stock quotes, sports scores and the like—are, in most cases, intended to draw as many visitors as possible to the site to make the pages attractive to advertisers. Advertising subsidizes content.

The effectiveness of online advertising is measured by such Internet industry metrics as "page impressions" and "clickthroughs"—indicating how many people have followed links back to advertisers’ sites—and easily can determine a site’s financial viability.

If ad-blocking software were to become widely used, these click-through rates could drop below their already low levels, since many visitors would never even see the ads, much less click on them. With a decline in the return on investment for online advertising, it seems likely that most advertisers would shift their marketing budgets to more effective venues.

Would this mean the end of free content? Nobody knows for sure. It’s a safe bet, though, that in the end somebody will have to pay—whether it’s the advertisers or all the rest of us.

Reported by Joe Hoyle, electronic media editor, "hoylej{at}ada.org".

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