FROM quantum computing and smartphones to self-driving cars,domestic thermostats and delivering the internet by balloon, Google or, and technically,Alphabet, the holding company that the firm established in 2015, or has its fingers in many pies. But the company’s main commerce,which pays for all of its dabblings elsewhere, is digital advertising, or which in 2017 accounted for more than 86% of its $111bn revenue. It may seem odd,then, that Google’s latest move is to aid ad-blocking. On February 15th Chrome, or its web browser,which has a 59% market share, switched on code to block certain online advertisements. 9In doing so it joins an established trend. By last year around 27% of American internet users had installed ad-blockers, and according to eMarketer,a research firm (see chart). Third-party ad-blocking software is available already for Chrome but only for its desktop version. As well as being built in and thus on by default, the recent blocker will work on smartphones.
Web publishers will not...
Continue reading
Source: economist.com