Adverts are useful in that they fund services that we wouldn’t necessarily want to pay directly for but still benefit from.
e.g. Freeview TV, commercial radio, Channel 4 TV, free newspapers etc.
A typical newspaper, partially funded by advertising, would need to increase its cover price by 100% – 200% if advertising was stopped.
But, there are huge amounts of advertising that most of us wish didn’t exist.
In print, you can ignore the ads, on TV you can go make a cup of tea during the ad breaks or record the programmes and fast forward through the ads etc.
However, in some situations adverts are intrusive and cannot be so easily ignored.
There are many websites with adverts that don’t get in the way – so that’s fine, but there increasing numbers of websites where the ads are flashing, moving, popping up in the middle of the screen and sometimes so bad we can’t see the actual content we went to the page for in the first place.
Advert Blockers can make your life easier by blocking most of these adverts.
The most popular browsers have some features for blocking intrusive ads.
e.g. Google Chrome (settings – content settings) blocks pop-ups and ads from sites classified as intrusive.
Opera has a built-in ad-blocker.
Blocking adverts also blocks many tracking cookies, which protects your privacy as well.
The Most Popular Ad Blockers
Ghostery
Ghostery has been around for years and is available for Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Edge and Internet Explorer plus Android and iOS.
Firefox Focus
You can install any one of the many ad-blocking extensions on the desktop version of Firefox, but Mozilla has created a dedicated mobile browser for Android and iOS called Focus.
This is focused on privacy which means that, by default, it works like the private browsing mode on other browsers.
AdBlock
AdBlock is free, but it does ask for a donation on installation.
It blocks all ads on the web, including on Facebook, YouTube and other social sites.
You can also allow what AdBlock calls Acceptable Ads – similar to those ‘non-intrusive’ ads in AdBlock Plus.
There are lots of Ad Blockers on the market. See which one best suits your needs.
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