You may now be thinking, if the ads are too intrusive, why shouldn’t you just install an ad blocker? After all, most of them are free.
To one’s surprise, even with an ad blocker, there is still a price users shoulder for those annoying ads, not to disrupt their experience. Ad blockers, just like any platform offering free services, face the challenge of sustaining developers, servers, and regular updates. This leads to a simple question: how do ad blockers make money to sustain their running costs?
Besides a small number of donations from millions of users, ad blockers like AdGuard and AdBlock make money through premium subscriptions that offer stronger privacy features and extra security tools, including VPNs.
Visiting sites with overly disruptive ads that make you consider a premium ad blocker? Built-in tools like Chrome’s ad blocker can help, filtering the most intrusive ads while keeping your device’s data safe.
You’ve likely noticed certain ads appearing even when a blocker is active. This is not an error. These are “acceptable ads,” a business model where ad blockers whitelist ads from established advertisers. Tools like Adblock Plus charge large advertisers—companies like Amazon, Nike, or Coca-Cola—about 30% of their ad budget to whitelist their ads while blocking the rest. This means the blocker decides which ads you see based on who pays.
There is another cost that is easier to miss. To understand it, look at how ad blockers work. See, when you load a website or app, your device requests files—text, photos, scripts, and videos—from the site’s servers. In this setup, Ad blockers sit between your device and those servers, filtering out ad-related files so the page loads without ads, often leaving blank spaces where ads would have appeared.
Among other things, ad blockers also block trackers like analytics tools built into websites to collect information about you. To filter these requests, ad blockers need deep access through browser or app permissions. That access gives them visibility into the same category of data that websites collect. Many ad blockers have been found selling user data to advertisers, marketing agencies, and AI training companies. Depending on the permissions you agree to, this can include device information, browsing behaviour, passwords, location data, installed apps, and other sensitive details.
Elon Musk once joked on Joe Rogan’s podcast that “Nobody really cares what porn you watch,” yet the concerns around user data reach far beyond your browsing history. Any tool granted wide access to your browser or apps should be one you trust and one you fully understand in how it handles the information you allow it to see.
We already know browsers like Chrome and search engines like Google gather your data to personalise ads. Adding an ad blocker introduces another party into your data chain, and in many cases, you do not know who they are, how they operate, or what their long-term business model is.
You decide if that trade-off is worth it.
