The moralism and hypocrisy around ad blockers

With my new iPhone, I can finally install ad blockers. When I tried to find information about the available options, I was struck by the moralism and hypocrisy of many articles on the subject. This subtitle says it all: How to use ad-blockers in iOS 9 (and why you shouldn’t).

Sure, the article makes some valid points. One may question Apple’s motives for allowing ad blockers. And certainly, one may question Adblock’s policy to allow «acceptable ads» from companies that pay them a fee (so use an alternative like the open source uBlock Origin instead). But the claim that ad blocking could «kill journalism as we know it» seems a bit over the top.

The advertising industry tries to frame ad blocking as an attack on «the little guy», by which they mean small, independent publishers. Their strategy is similar to the Home taping is killing music campaign of the 1980s, by which the music industry tried to make us believe that home taping was bad for musicians. In reality, home taping was killing the profits of the very industry that was exploiting those musicians in the first place.

Journalists should be paid for their work, but I’m not convinced advertising is the solution. Ads are annoying, they slow down the internet, they waste valuable surface on mobile screens, they often come with scripts that track you and sometimes they spread malware. Perhaps even more importantly: ideally, journalists shouldn’t depend on advertising in the first place, because advertising is killing independent journalism.

So how should journalists get paid? I’m not sure there’s an easy answer. One way is to pay collectively, which may work rather well (BBC), but it does entail some degree of state regulation. Another way is to buy subscriptions from each site or publisher who publish interesting articles - but that’s rather cumbersome.

A practical alternative are subscription services like Blendle - described as the «the Netflix or Spotify for journalism» (although it’s more like iTunes in that you pay per article). Blendle is an interesting initiative, but there’s reason for caution.

If successful, services like Blendle may well develop into large corporations that try to control access to news stories - much like Spotify tries to control access to music (and Facebook tries to control access to news stories). The outcome could be that subscription services become profitable by exploiting journalists. Also, subscription services could amass an unhealthy degree of control over what we read, and could introduce similar opaque algorithms as the ones Facebook uses to decide what content we get to see.

Things might get interesting if journalists would draw inspiration from musicians and set up cooperatives. These could take the form of not-for-profit Blendle alternatives that offer independent quality journalism at a fair price, produced by journalists who are paid a fair wage for their work.

For now, ad blockers not only offer practical benefits; they also force the internet to address its unhealthy dependency on advertising.