Ad blocking

About

Ad blocking^[1] is the process of blocking internet advertisements, with the most common methods being either a browser extension, a standalone app, or the browser itself.

Origin

The earliest instance of a browser extension which blocks ads was Adblock 0.1 for the Phoenix browser(later renamed to Firefox) created by Henrik Aasted Sorensen on December 3, 2002. Sorensen continued development of Adblock until version 0.3, when maintain was handed over to another user named Rue for 0.4. The project hasn't been updated since March 29, 2007 with Adblock 0.5.^[2]

Spread

In 2015, PageFair and Adobe released a report on the effect of Ad blocking. In it, they said that usage of ad blocking software sharply increased since mid 2012.^[3]

Notable Examples

Adblock Plus & AdBlock

Contrary to popular belief, Adblock and Adblock Plus are not developed by the same programmers. Nor Adblock Plus is the upper version of the program Adblock. Adblock is developed by indepented programmers.

The very first one is "Adblock Plus". Which has been developed by various programmers from the company Eyeo GmbH on 2006^[5]. It was only an extension for Firefox. On 2009 independent programmer Michael Gundlach created an alternative program "Adblock" for chrome web browser which is completely unrelated to but inspired from "Adblock Plus"^[8].

Events

Catblock

On April 1 2012, Michael Gundlach turned "Adblock" into "Catblock" for April fools day. Ad images or animations had changed with pictures of cats or image macro series as known as lolcats. ^[9]

Adblock's Ad

On Aug 27, 2013 Adblock developers started a new campaign to get rid of advertisement.

The campaign simply planned to put an end to ads with raising over 50000 dollars.^[6] In other words: with buying ads.
"One ad to end all ad" project rejected by most of the internet community. (on left). On the same day youtube user Ockeroid uploaded an animated parody of Adblock campaign video(on right).

Loss of revenue

Most websites doesn't block ad-blocking software usage. Although cases may vary from a simple banner suggesting disabling adblock solutions to negating website access.

For example, when visiting the popular videogame modding website gamebanana. the above image would appear in place of regular banner ads, encouraging users to disable their ad-blocking utilities.

In similar fashion. Users that venture in the flash animation portal Newgrounds would see a series of agressive-esque banners commanding them to turn off their adblock add-ons (see below) Although the anti-adblock banners only appear if said users nevigate the site using obsolete blacklists.

Other sites opt for more extreme measures, especially those related by file hosting or movie/series streaming. These measures include, but are not limited to, restriction of website usage, disabling certain characteristics, or even making it impossible the browsing on web page. Forcing users to disable their adblock programs.

Countermeasures

Some Adblock Plus users noticed they couldn’t access webpages due to anti-adblock scripts, and started creating threads in the official Adblock Plus forums asking how circumvent those restrictions.^[10] Blacklist-Maintainers soon updated their lists making the Anti-Adblock scripts being not executed when the browser requests to server the contents of the page, but not just because these commands were forcing the disabling of Adblock-plus, but also because some these scripts were privacy and security threats.

Adblock's counterattack caused the webmasters of the sites involved begun to implement more sophisticated utilities on their websites, in order to minimize the by-pass attemps.

Search Interest

External References