In the pre-technology age, televiewers use the long stretch of time when commercials are shown for bathroom breaks or get some food or drinks from the refrigerator or pantry. Newspaper readers, in turn, simply turn the page or just ignore the print ads.

Netizens today have the added advantage offered by advertising blocker applications to filter out unwanted ads and other pop-ups on the computer screens, tablets or smartphones. These apps, however, present a threat to web firms such as Facebook and Google, which relies heavily on advertising income to boost their company profitability.

Since advertisers discovered the power of Internet, ad firms have added online advertising to their options to make their products and services known. Their options range from commercial spots to pop-up links.

These pop-up often appears from time to time by triggering an action like clicking another link or during loading in games. It is used to promote related applications or related webpages which are profitable in a lot of ways.

Ad filtering is the method which prevents these ad popups from appearing in a web page by removing or altering the advertising content in a webpage. Basically, a web browser has some ad blocking capabilities but does not work on all kinds of ad pop-ups.

One such app just released online is AdBlock Plus which could affect developers as well as web companies in terms of promotion and possibly their profit as well for mobile device adverts.

Functions of Ad Blockers

The common method of ad blockers is simply block the pop-up or autoplay of Flash animations or image loading or audio and video files. Numerous browser extensions in Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Chrome are available to be installed.

For advance filtering, blacklisting or whitelisting is used to express filtration, possibly preventing the web page source itself from sending anything to the user. Several browsers can be manually configured for it, some extensions allow this service, and some anti-virus acts as ad blockers but usually as a premium service.

Benefits of Ad Blockers

Users benefits from ad blockers because the app improves loading time of webpages, provides cleaner looking web pages which are free from advertisements, lessens demand on resources like bandwidth, CPU and memory, and provides privacy benefits by exclusion from tracking and profiling of ad delivery platforms.

For advertisers, it is a good way not to annoy customers who could provokes them to uninstall related applications and leave the webpages.

Effects on Developers

Most users would consider it very convenient not having any pop-ups whenever they open a webpage or open mobile applications free from ad displays that are usually bothering, particularly the ad location, mostly at the bottom of the page, that sometimes block menus.

However, for developers, the ad blocking app may subdue overall online revenue and makes developers unable to sustain their products or services.

Tom Taulli of InvestorPlace, however, pointed out that the new app would only block intrusive ads, but still allow messages from respected marketing and advertising companies such as Amazon.

He also pointed out that it takes some time before an app has widespread use, which would provide web owners some time off to think of ad strategies that would work on mobile devices.

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