The concept of the web being free comes with strings attached. Although most websites are free to read, their owners need to pay for storage space and servers (besides various licenses), and storages and servers and networks run on electricity. In order to keep website content free to read, these expenditures are met indirectly.

Broadly, there are mainly two things that pay for the web: advertisements and paywalls. Bots track your usage via your browser and tell advertisors what you like so they can show you ads you are most likely to click on. Websites act as platforms to show these ads, possibly coax you into clicking on them and exploring advertised products or content, and make money in turn.

The free internet?

Thus, advertisements, in effect, help keep the web free. The Guardian recently ran an article on how ad-blockers could herald the end of the free internet, and they are likely correct — if ad-blocking takes off among mainstream web users — but this need not be a bad thing.

First of all, ad-blockers are not a new thing: power users of most browsers have been long aware of ad-blockers; some used them while others made a consicous decision not to block the one source of income that website owners do have to keep their content free. That said, the biggest reason for the sudden hullabaloo about ad-blockers is that the biggest player in the tech world, Apple, with iOS 9 officially started supporting ad-blockers on its iOS devices.

Ad blockers come with an important asterisk: while they do benefit a ton of people in major ways, they also hurt some, including many who don’t deserve the hit.
— Marco Arment

Free content and good content

Mobile apps reach users faster than personal computer apps and it was no surprise that ad-blockers topped App Store lists following the public release of iOS 9. It just means more people are more likely to use ad-blockers than ever before. And some developers of ad-blockers, like Marco Arment whose app, Peace, was the most popular ad-blocker on the App Store, have pulled their apps because of the effect it can have on the income of content providers.

Some websites will go down — probably some good websites — while some will attempt to survive on paywalls (tolerable if there is limited free access in place) or donations (pretty annoying, but understandable). The web will undoubtedly no longer be free. But will the quality of content fall?

Nothing to do with a neutral web

The essence of the web is in its being a free platform to reach everyone in the world. But it has always, throughout its life, had paymets, just not in currency. I have long been an advocate of a neutral web, and that, I strongly believe, is where the beauty of the internet lies. Not that it is free, but that it is neutral. It treats an unknown individual the same as it treats a famous multi-billion-dollar company like Facebook, for example. And blocking advertisemens will not change this in any way.

That said, the freedom afforded by the internet means good writing as well as trash gets delivered to readers day in and day out. This has led to what is known as FoMO, the fear of missing out. It is a “pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent.” It makes you want to take in content after content, information after information, data after data, regardless of usefulness, its implication, its storage in your biological memory or its need. In short it turns you into the opposite of an intelligent reader.

A book-era internet

Paid access will weed out said trash — which is a subjective term, mind you, one man’s trash being another’s treasure and all that — and, by making content cost something, even if something small, it will make readers think before reading, while reading, and after reading. It will force paid content providers to provide content worth the price (at the least) and the strong internet community will unanimously bring down over-chargers and unworthy content. The internet, that way, is exceedingly capable of taking care of itself.

It will take us back to an era when information — books, that is — costed something and were edited, and hence their content was written responsibly and digested thoughtfully. The internet, in making content free, has allowed poorer content into our homes, and kickstarted a serious overdose of information. That is not to say personal websites, opinions and such are of no use. In fact, this is another highlight of the web, but if someone’s opinions are worth reading, they are probably also worth paying to read. Or the website needs to be run through alternate funding — like I run this one — without ads.

Business models

People with deep pockets or good financial management can always pay for their websites. They are not always the costliest of assets. But what about those who earn a livelihood from their websites? They expect their sites to pay for themselves. The question then becomes, can they coax readers into paying for content? Because these readers blocked the ads through which they were indirectly paying for the content.

Further, ad-blocking can put an end to tracking and improve privacy. If you are not going to even view advertisements, let alone click on them, why should advertisers bother to track you or learn your habits and interests? Why would they have to monitor your location to serve (sometimes helpful, often annoying) location-based advertisements?

Like a lot of things, ad-blocking comes with pros and cons. And it comes down to weighing a free internet against a paid internet. The essence of the web, its neutrality, is not harmed at any point. You pay to access the web anyway, pay a paltry amount extra to access the content you want. That way you get selective about your content, you get rid of FoMO, you get good content, and yours becomes a well-developed and -formed mind.

The costs itself can truly be paltry. As an ideal case, consider a simple website that costs $200 every year to manage. And even if the site itself gets just 5000 visitors a year, it can easily pay for itself charging each user no more than 4¢. And if, at the average rate of 5¢ a site, you access 100 sites regularly, you pay $5 to consume content on the web. And this is besides any free content you can always access.

The problem arises when ad-blockers, in a move strikingly similar to ISPs threatening net neutrality, begin to charge websites to bypass ad-blockers. Crystal, another leading ad-blocker on the App Store, is doing precisely this. But I do not see the model lasting. Since all the blocking takes place on the client-side, if users drop Crystal for another ad-blocker, the bypass money poured in by content provider goes to the dogs. This contrasts with ISPs and the net neutrality debate because in the case of charging for not throttling internet speeds, all the blocking/speeding up/slowing down work is done on the Providers’ end and users have no control over it.

In addition, when ad-blockers block styling and other interface elements that contribute to the look and feel of the website and force a deviation from the intended user experience, they can end up having an unnecessarily adverse effect. This is certainly something to watch out for: ad-blockers that block ads and ads alone are a good thing. Those which allow blocking of type, non-advertising scripts and such ought to be called content blockers instead and be banished.

Are ad-blockers a good thing? Not by heart, possibly. And definitely not to the miser who looks for free content access. But it has its own benefits for users. Time will tell how ad-blockers shape the web, but there is no doubt that they will — and there is further no doubt that they should be allowed and encouraged on the web.

Cover image by Iloque

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