The internet is filled with ads: popups, banner ads, pop-up, pop-under, video ads. Sometimes there are more ads than content. Do you remember the time when you just wanted to see a video or read an article, but couldn't because there was an ad on top of it?
As a result of the overwhelming amount of ads, some developers had decided to create ad-blockers. A small program you add to your browser (Chrome, Firefox) that blocks all of these advertisements. There are many programs like this: Adblock Plus or UBlock Origin.
Ad-blocking or moral obligation?
Advertising is a billion dollar industry: 27 billion dollar revenue in 2016. Yes, that's billion with a B.
In case you are wondering about that amount, there's 1.5 billion dollar in the image below;
Sometimes the goal of a website is simply to sell a product, so they can have a cut of the profit.
This isn't necessarily the only purpose, for some its to record everything you do on every site you visit, so then that data can be correlated to your credit history and other real world sources to profile you and optimally manipulate your behaviour.
In fact, one of the 2017 US presidential candidates used data collected by trackers to create personal campaigns. (Some people may care about gun rights, while others may be more sensitive to education or housing issues). Meaning it's not just about your life any more, but also to influence politics.
Anti ad-blocking measures
You'd think that installing an ad blocker solves the problem - but website owners out for your attention, personal data and money. The advertising companies themself may not necessarily care: the visitors that block ads, are not the ones likely to click ads anyway.
For website owners, it could mean financial loss. Because of that, many websites use anti ad-blocking measures.
A new study done by University of Iowa and UC Riverside found that thousands of sites are doing anti ad-blocking measures. From the top 10.000 websites found on the web, 30.5% uses anti ad-blocking measures.
These websites add scripts, small computer programs, to their websites that detect if you are using an ad-blocker. Techniques used are "pixel tracking" (loading an image and secretly storing a file on your computer. Other methods include detection which browser extensions you use or simply 'baits'.
Legal
In the European Union explicit consent is required by law to track users.
On top of the, under EU law in force since May 2011, people must give their consent before an anti-ad-blocker script can run and hide content on a page.
In practice, most website owners do not care about this law because it's simply to complex to implement (different laws for each country) or simply because it costs them money.
Alternative business models
Advertising has been the traditional business model of the web. This goes back to as early as 1995, when most people had nothing but dial-up internet.
It doesn't necessarily have to be the future. With the rise of cryptocurrency, new business models are possible.
To give a clear example: A JavaScript miner called Coinhive, mines for the cryptocurrency Monero. This miner uses a website visitor's computing power to mine the cryptocurrency, while the visitor is consuming the content of the webpage.
We'll see what the future brings, I hope for at least a usable web. One in which the web does have more valuable content than ads.
Just my 2 cents.