I like LifeHacker; I really do. The website is a great resource for “tips, tricks, and downloads for getting things done,” as their about page says. But like any site, sometimes they miss the mark.
LifeHacker recently published an article by TheFu on how to block ads while web-surfing. TheFu goes in depth on how to modify your hosts file to block communication with ad servers, breaking down step-by-step how to avoid online advertisements.
What the article doesn’t mention is the philosophy behind advertising and the reason that websites host ads in the first place. Furthermore, they declined to publish my comment on the matter.
For those interested, this is the comment that LifeHacker declined to publish:
This article is very informative on how to block ads. What it doesn’t address is the reason for the ads in the first place. A large percentage of the content that is available “for free” on the internet is because of funding that is made possible through advertisements. Sites like Google and Facebook, as well as a “host” of other sites, make a large portion of their income through advertising–income that is needed for these sites (especially the smaller ones) to stay in business. For non-ad-blocking viewers like myself, it’s clear that even LifeHacker gets some support from these ads (I’m currently seeing in this very article an advertisement for Nintendo 3DS and T-Mobile).
Do you like the internet services that are provided to you “for free” by sites that publish advertisements? I think it’s safe to say that you probably do. If so, before you go blocking every advertisement possible, remember that these sites exist, in large part, because of these advertisements. As an extreme thought experiment, what if every user on the internet used some sort of ad-blocking technique? Advertisers would stop paying publishers (that is, the sites that are providing services to users), then the publishers would not make any income, and they would no longer have any capital to operate their sites with. Users would have ad-free internet with no content.
Granted, that is taking things to an extreme, but the point is still the same: if you are blocking ads, you are hurting the sites you visit.
Ads serve a purpose. Don’t take the websites you use for granted by blocking their ads.
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