The Benefits of Using an Ad Blocker
This month was AdBlock’s 12th birthday! Some of you AdBlock users have been with us from the very beginning. You’ve been supporting us and using our product for over a decade! Others of you are newer, and some of you are at the start of learning what your ad blocker can do for you.
Earlier this year, we asked our community of loyal readers and supporters to tell us which online distractions are the most annoying. Hundreds of you gave your opinions! From floating videos to newsletter pop-ups to cookie notices, we found that our users definitely get annoyed by these distractions.
Not only is the internet chock full of distractions, but there are ad trackers, too. In the NY Times article, I Visited 47 Sites. Hundreds of Trackers Followed Me, reporter Farhad Manjoo found that hundreds of trackers follow the average internet user. What were these trackers doing exactly? They collected user information like location, interests, and even data about users’ devices. All to target ads.
Between excessive ad tracking, annoying pop-ups, and other distractions, it can feel like you don’t have a lot of control over your internet experience. Thankfully, that’s not true if you’re using an ad blocker.
Here’s how your ad blocker gives you more control over what you see and share online.
Ad blockers block pop-ups.
Pop-ups come in many shapes and sizes. Autoplay videos that follow you around your screen, cookie notifications, and newsletter pop-ups, to name a few.
An ad and pop-up blocker like AdBlock for Chrome, AdBlock for Edge, or AdBlock for Firefox, can block pop-ups and other annoying ads. You can even hide cookie notifications!
Blocking pop-ups and other ads improves page load times. Ads include text and images, which take time to load on the page. When you use an ad blocker, it blocks these ads from appearing and your page loads faster.
To block more pop-ups, we recommend Distraction Control. Distraction Control is part of our suite of AdBlock Premium features. It allows you to stop most videos from playing automatically while preventing floating or “sticky” videos that follow you across the screen as you browse. It also allows you to block those pesky pop-ups for newsletter sign-ups, survey invitations, and requests to “allow site notifications.”
You’ll need to enroll in AdBlock Premium to try the features included with Distraction Control. That’s easy to do:
- Install AdBlock.
- Upgrade to AdBlock Premium. AdBlock users with Premium enabled can choose to block all these distractions or only some of them via the Premium tab on the AdBlock Options page.
Ad blockers help protect privacy.
Protecting your personal information has never been harder than in the internet age. Take what’s been happening at Life360 for instance. Life360, a family location sharing app designed to help parents keep their children safe, has been selling its users’ precise location data. But why is this data being sold in the first place?
This is partly thanks to targeted advertising and online ad tracking. Ad tracking is when advertisers use trackers to follow you online. With these trackers, advertisers gain insights into your behavior, preferences, and personal information. They use this information to target you with ads relevant to your interests, making it more likely you’ll buy their products.
Ad blockers can help disable third-party tracking to make it more difficult for advertisers to track your behavior as you browse. With AdBlock, you can subscribe to the EasyPrivacy filter list. Easy Privacy is an optional filter list that blocks most trackers on the web. (Please note that using this filter list may cause issues on sites that rely on third-party trackers, like many banking sites do. You can typically work around that by adding sites to your allowlist, though this will unblock ads on those sites, too.)
To subscribe to the EasyPrivacy filter list:
- Click on the red AdBlock stop sign in the upper right corner of your browser. If you don’t see it there, click the puzzle piece and it should be listed in a dropdown menu of your extensions.
2. Click the Gear icon in the upper right corner of the AdBlock window.
3. On the left sidebar, click Filter Lists.
4. Scroll down to Other Filter Lists and tick the EasyPrivacy filter list. (It will turn blue when enabled.)
Ad blockers can skip video ads.
To say that YouTube is a popular video site is an understatement. Last September, YouTube announced that they passed the 50 million mark for Music and Premium subscribers. And that’s not counting the many people that use YouTube without a subscription! We can all agree that YouTube is home to some of the greatest content on the web. However, it’s also home to some of the most obnoxious ads.
That’s where an ad blocker comes in! AdBlock allows you to block YouTube ads everywhere, including pre-roll and mid-roll video ads (also known as the ads that interrupt the video you were trying to watch). It’ll also block other ads on YouTube, such as sidebar ads and banner ads.
If there’s a content creator you’d like to support, you still can. With AdBlock, you can allow ads on any channel you choose. This setting pauses AdBlock anytime you watch a video from your selected channels while continuing to block ads everywhere else.
Do you watch videos on sites other than YouTube? AdBlock can also block video ads everywhere else! This includes blocking Twitch ads and other video streaming sites.
Ad blockers can customize your internet experience.
Just because something on a web page isn’t an ad, doesn’t mean you want to see it. What if you personally prefer to ignore parts of a site? For instance, maybe you’re not interested in “Who to follow” on Twitter. Or perhaps the stories your news site recommends you read next aren’t something you’d like to focus on.
With an ad blocker like AdBlock, you can block the parts of sites that you’d simply prefer not to see. AdBlock’s manual blocking “wizard” allows you to customize your internet experience — giving you control over what it is you see or don’t.
When you see something you want to block on a page, follow these steps:
- Click on the red AdBlock stop sign in the upper right corner of your browser. If you don’t see it there, click the puzzle piece and it should be listed in a dropdown menu of your extensions.
2. On the AdBlock menu, click Hide something on this page.
3. Click on the item you want to hide, and use the slider to make sure that you hide everything you want. As you move the slider, it blocks more elements.
4. If the item is successfully blocked, click Looks good
5. Click Confirm to confirm and save.
The next time you visit the page, AdBlock will remember what you’ve hidden. That means you can block an item once, and every time you visit that page, it will be gone.
In a nutshell, using an ad blocker gives you control over what you see on the internet, and helps protect your privacy while you use it. Interested in trying one out? To download AdBlock, visit getadblock.com from the browser of your choice. If you run into any trouble, visit our Help Center or send us a line at help@getadblock.com. We’re always happy to hear from you!
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