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The Ethical Ad Blocker

by Darius Kazemi, Sep 15, 2015

People in media have been hand-wringing over ad blockers for many years now, but it's been back in the news recently because iOS9 now allows ad blocking in Safari. The issues remain the same, though:

• Ads are terrible. They drain mobile batteries and slow down the browsing experience. They're aesthetically annoying and sometimes use dark UX patterns to trick the user into clicking.
• Ads are also the only really viable way to make money if your business model isn't "sell a discrete item to people in exchange for cash." Subscription models and other alternatives have so far mostly failed, at least at the large scale that newspapers and similar operate at.
• When a user blocks ads, they hurt the publications that provide the content the user wants by denying them their income. They are (sort of) stealing content.

Fortunately I've developed a simple solution. The Ethical Ad Blocker is a Chrome extension that, when it detects advertising on a website, blocks the entire website. This way, the user doesn't experience ads, but they also don't leech free content.

Everybody wins. Download it today!

(The Ethical Ad Blocker is a fork of the open source project Adblock Plus. I had to put its code online for GPLv3 compliance reasons. I'm sorry in advance.)