There’s a battle raging over the Internet right now — one that pits a multibillion-dollar industry against a few lines of code.
On the surface, the sticking point is whether or not people should have to look at the pop-ups, banners, autoplay videos and the other attention-grabbing ploys that subsidize most free websites. The tools that enable them not to do so are easier than ever to use.
But at stake, those who make their livelihood on the web warn, is the future of the Internet as we know it.
Once the province of a small, dedicated core of code-savvy web surfers, ad-blocking software is enjoying more mainstream popularity thanks to simplified installation processes, security concerns and growing unease over mass personal data collection.
The number of people who use ad-blocking software worldwide has ballooned by 41% to nearly 200 million in the past year, according to a report released this week by Adobe and PageFair, an Ireland-based startup that helps companies combat ad-blockers.
That’s a small fraction of the nearly 3 billion people estimated to use the Internet worldwide but enough to evaporate an almost $22 billion chunk of total online ads revenue this year, the report says.
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