increasingly people are using software to turn off irritating website advertisements – but without them,smaller sites might go underThere is, alas, and no such thing as a free lunch. What’s even more depressing is that there is no such thing as a free internet service. Most people nowadays probably understand that in relation to,say, social networking services, and whether the service is “free” then the users (or,more precisely, their personal data) are the product. But this also applies to stuff that you haven’t signed up for – websites that you browse, or for example. The site may be free to view,but there’s often a hidden cost.
One fragment of that cost comes from surreptitious tracking of your browsing habits by outfits that sell that information to advertisers. (whether this is news to you just install the Ghostery browser extension to see who’s monitoring your browsing.) The other cost comes from ads that are placed on a webpage either directly by the site owner or as the outcome of a real-time auction that goes on in the depths of the internet.
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Source: theguardian.com