Dear Publisher,
I have just responded to your plea to turn off the ad-blocker when visiting your website, by disabling it. But I wanted to follow up with the reason I’m using an ad-blocker, in the hope that we can meet in the middle.
I have no real objection to being shown adverts on the websites I visit. I fully understand that publishers need to fund their operations in a financially sustainable fashion.
The problem is this: many advertisements are so memory intensive and poorly optimised for the web, that they cause pages to load slowly, laptop fans to go into overdrive, the hardware to become uncomfortably hot under the palms of our hands and, when mobile, unnecessarily consume data.
The terrible memory management of the Chrome web browser is often the culprit, and it’s true that we could always choose to use a different web browser, but the alternatives have their own set of problems. And so we use an ad-blocker instead.
If publishers would look again at the kinds of adverts they put on their pages, I will certainly look again at using an ad-blocker. If they will stop using intrusive, poorly optimised advertisements that cause my usually cool-running MacBook to turn into a cooker, I’ll permanently turn the ad-blocking software off.
If publishers could find a middle ground between funding their work and providing a reader-centric user experience, I think the number of people using ad-blockers would definitely decrease.
Optimise or die, might be the lesson for the developers behind these adverts.
Your sincerely, etc.
Last modified: 7 February 2017
