On Monday, Twitter was set ablaze, first by confusion, then by mixed emotion, as content creators praised Google’s decision to treat ads like pre-videos, completely nixing ad block programs everywhere. As expected, much of the praise was drowned out by lament from ad block users.
AD BLOCK: WHAT EXACTLY HAPPENED
It’s really quite clever how Google decided to not just navigate around ad block programs but to bypass them altogether. Previously, programs like AdBlock allowed people to completely skip commercials on YouTube, but now users are pretty much forced to sit through every ad thrown at them. For many of the longer ads, there isn’t even a way for users to skip halfway through.
AD BLOCKING IS THE FUTURE
Last month, we reported on how PageFair and Adobe published a report indicating that the use of ad block software had increased 41 percent worldwide. Publishers are claiming that the rise of such technology is costing them billions of dollars; however, it’s difficult to put a price on theoretical money that isn’t really accountable. If we round the American population to a flat 318 million and say that movie tickets are, on average, nine bucks, then Hollywood could also claim that aliens are costing them $2.8 billion for every movie release. It’s purely a fictitious number made up of a pool of non-existent money.
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The truth of the matter is that as more and more millennials grow up and more baby boomers are phased out, the effectiveness of advertisement, in its current form, is called into question. According to SocialChorus, only 6 percent of millennials in the US believe that advertisement is effective, and 95 percent of the same group believe word of mouth is a more credible source of information about products.
A lot of advertisements online are very intrusive to a user’s browsing experience, so it’s pretty easy to see why someone might seek to get rid of them. But there is perhaps an even greater risk for allowing ads to show in your browser. Unfortunately, a larger percentage of malware code comes in from Flash and Java ads that are hosted by third party ad networks. While some publishers do try and maintain security, there are simply too many out there.
YOU CAN BYPASS GOOGLE’S BYPASS
Don’t worry, though. Google made the change to the YouTube app that exists inside the Chrome browser. Here is how you can still have an ad-free YouTube experience:
- enter ‘chrome://apps’ into the address bar
- right click on the YouTube app
- click remove from Chrome
That’s literally all it takes and you’ll have the ad block program of your choice up and running again.
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