Is a free internet a thing of the past?

If ad blocking continues to experience the growth it has until now, marketers will have to become far smarter about how they get their products in front of consumers

The music and film industries have long been sounding the warning bell about the demise of their industries due to piracy. It’s because, they say, everyone – especially millennials – now expect everything for free. While this may or may not be the case in music and film, it’s fair to say that pretty much every user of the internet expects it to be free.

The only costs a user associates with the internet are for the devices they use to access it and the data package the provider charges for. If you asked someone if they’d be willing to pay for looking up the cinema times at their local cinema or even logging on to their favourite social network, it’s almost certain the answer would be no. However, most users probably fail to realise why or even how it’s possible that the internet is available for free.

As we all know, the answer for the most part is of course ads. Ads fund pretty much all of the quality content online, from newspapers and blogs to social networks and even YouTube. The problem with this model of funding is that over time users have become irritated with irrelevant and badly served ads and are now turning to ad blocking technology to enable them to skip the ads.

Ad blocking has been discussed at length in tech circles but not many outside a small, tech-savvy user base have been aware of it – or have been using it. However, this is beginning to change with greater numbers of users starting to become aware of the technology. Ad blocking was even featured on Howard Stern’s long running radio show in America last month. Shortly after the segment was on air ‘Ad blocker’ was trending on Apple’s App store.

You know things have gone mainstream when Apple announces they will include the technology as standard. It’s been confirmed that Apple will include a ‘content blocking’ option in the next iOS release. iOS 9 will allow users to install apps that block ads, trackers and other unwanted content for the first time.

It’s not hard to understand why users are adapting to this new technology in droves (198 million users are now using ad blockers around the world). Pages load on average 90 per cent faster when ads are removed. This is a phenomenal change for users and will have a significant impact in the real world.

Consumers are not always connected to wi-fi and, even when they are, the network is often constrained for much of the day to balance load by an internet service provider. Slow pages and long loading times are the bane of many user’s web experience. Users have also been subjected to a barrage of more and more ads from all sources. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and now Instagram have all either introduced – in Instagram’s case – or vastly increased, in the case of the rest, paid advertising and sub-