How do online ads change during the pandemic?

As the pandemic also brought a financial crisis for some companies, online ads became the main way for them to reach their costumers. Online companies try to take benefit of this situation and invest more in online advertising, while the offline ones need to adapt, in order to remain on the market. They now have to move fast, learn and invest more in internet advertising.

Why are there so many online ads, lately?

In order to stay on the market, keep their customers and their employees, most of the online companies use more and more artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning – programmatic advertising. This means that their ads will follow us – the prospects (potential customers), everywhere on the internet. At first, the online advertisements will try to offer us the reason for which we might need a product. Then, they will offer us the way to obtain or do what we have just discovered that we need. Afterwards, the company will come with the product that fulfils the need.

Now, we know better why online advertising seems to chase us, no matter where we browse. If some of us considered that the online ads used to be annoying before, now we might get mad because of them. They never seem to stop. And this is absolutely explainable, as people search more about “online ads”, “google ads” or “google advertising”.

The rush for customers affects us all

Online ads follow us no matter the channel. YouTube users, for instance, complain more often about the intrusive online ads they can not skip. These ads upset their users as they can not benefit from the content they are interested in, without interruptions. So, some publishers decided to take steps and allow users watch the content only if they agree to see ads. But, in this case, they do their best to show relevant, non-intrusive ads. In fact, Google announced in February that Chrome would crack down on crappy video ads this August, which isn’t as altruistic as it sounds

On the other hand, both publishers and advertisers try to find the best way to stay on the market and keep their businesses alive. Publishers can not produce quality content without financial support from the advertisers, while the latter can not survive without their online public. So, we might say that there is good and bad about the online advertisements.

How to deal with internet ads?

As most of us try to find now online the things that we need, online ads might sometimes be useful. Especially when they are not intrusive and really target us with the things that we need. So, we might be in a dilemma if we should get rid of all the ads or how to choose between them. Especially now, when attackers try to steal data and money from users, by luring us with fake ads (malvertising). Also, Google announced its decision to fight bad ads even harder.

A good solution is to use an adjustable ad blocker, which lets us block annoying ads, but also offers us the possibility to disable the feature for the websites that we trust and appreciate most. Thus, we will stay away from threats, help the quality publishers survive and also receive valuable information from companies about the products that we need. When that blocker is a Windows native one, just as Ad Guardian Plus, and allows us navigate faster, it is even better. This is because it doesn’t need to install extensions. Moreover, thus we make sure our data is not sold by search engines to advertisers.