The advertisements bother me less than the tracking. The advertising and data broker industry caused this problem on themselves. The problem is that many sites have built their business model on this revenue. All I think will happen is that we will get an escalating arms race between advertisers and users. Logically the next step will be delivering advertisments as first party content
I'm surprised to see such a low figure for "% of adblockers who worry about how their personal data is being used by companies". Only 69%? That means a whopping 31% of users who do block ads are seriously deficient in their understanding of the privacy risks associated with Internet based advertising and/or dismiss risks that literally no intelligent human being would dismiss. I wonder how the questions were phrased.
I don't block ads because of "privacy" since I don't consider analytics private information. It is simple: people don't like to be annoyed. Shocking, I know! This is where that, "Do unto others" thing would be handy.
I actually like ads up to a point. However, I use the included ad blocker in 360 Extreme Explorer, because I don't like excessive advertising, which sadly is a big problem on some websites these days. I don't feel the need to use a 3rd party ad blocker.
I believe advertisements in general are psychologically harmful. I think they promote stress and attempt to place their product or service as a relief to that stress, or take away from human dignity and self-esteem in order to create a psychological need only solved by buying something not truly needed. There was a study by the New Economics Foundation to find a way to calculate the true 'value' in jobs, and they found that advertisers as a whole actually created a net cost to society because of the overall harm they cause in terms of dissatisfaction, inadequacy, wastefulness and psychological stress. For these reasons I don't watch TV, barely listen to the radio, and block ads in my browser. I notice that the Internet Advertising Bureau didn't even consider psychological effects or malvertising in their survey: http://www.bizreport.com/2015/07/01/blocking.png
http://www.bizreport.com/2015/07/iab-uk-not-all-ad-blockers-want-to-block-all-ads.html What Guy Phillipson neglects to mention is that consumers already do pay for the cost of advertising, as companies simply pass this cost onto consumers by raising the price of goods and services. This means that people who don't adblock are actually paying for the privilege of seeing ads!
As long as ad networks are used to also deliver malware, they can be considered as security risk, which can be easily prevented. Ad blocker is usually first (and most times the only) extension that I install when fixing other people computers. I don't know if survey also included this aspect of ad networks. Or maybe users are just not aware of it.
@Minimalist The full research is offered here (http://www.iabuk.net/research/library/ad-blocking-software-consumer-usage-and-attitudes) for members only.
