AdBlock Fair might save free content on the web

For the last ten years, I own a couple of websites, which support different kinds of communities. These websites became very successful within a couple of years with growing user amounts and growing amounts of content, which became very helpful for these people. Because these sites grew a lot, the costs to keep the needed servers ‘up’ were rising more frequently. I started to make space available on the websites for advertisers to cover most of these costs. This worked for a while but in the last years, the little revenue I make from advertising on these websites, started to decrease.

This is all due to the rise of software, which block advertisements on visited web pages. Adblock Plus, the most famous software to block advertisements on web pages, is the most successful and as you can see in the image above, Adblock Plus users amounts are rising faster than ever.

I understand ads on websites can be annoying and you might think some websites don’t need advertising revenue (which is absolutely true). I hate pop-up advertisements just as everyone else, and especially when advertisements are so frequently popping up that my CPU gets overheated, I try to avoid the websites, which causes these problems. This makes is logical, that Adblock Plus became so successful in a couple of years, but with these growing numbers of Adblock Plus users, people apparently aren’t aware of the problems it causes. Free content on the web is very much in danger due to Adblock Plus. The vast majority of websites and free content on the web owns it existence to their little revenue made out of advertisements and already lots of websites are down because the decrease in advertisement revenue in the last years. If this trend keeps going on, it’s just a matter of time before webmasters will use another way to make revenue out of their websites. It is very assumable that this will bring lots of website restrictions, and possible memberships for websites which will cause that free content will disappear on the web.

When I was surfing forums and blogs to learn more about this rising problem I ran into a different kind of software, which is used to block advertisements, namely Adblock Fair. This software is aiming to support creators of free content by letting the user choose on every specific website if they want to block the ads. It still enables people to block annoying ads, and ads, which might cause your CPU to work overtime, but the software points users into the direction of enabling ‘good’ websites to show their advertisements. Adblock Plus already had the possibility to unblock ads on specific website but Adblock Fair works differently because it is based upon letting ads through instead of blocking everything. I especially like the feature where they show how many users of a specific website allow the ads of that website. This might point users in the good direction. Also Adblock Fair might help advertisements to be nicer looking, less challenging for your CPU, since advertisers might want to get the form of their ads as attractive as possible. I really hope Adblock Fair will be a success because it might be the saviour for the internet as we know, namely the provider for free content for everyone!