Blocking Ads on the Internet

The Internet is an extremely appealing place for advertisers who want to target children. Not just because it’s largely unregulated, but because parents are happy to let children explore online in the belief that kids are learning skills they'll need to succeed in the working environments of the future.

The Internet also offers massive market penetration. While millions of children in the UK may see an advert in a magazine or on TV, a popular video on YouTube can reach many millions of people from all around the world.

While this is great news for advertisers, it makes life difficult for parents who want to protect kids from pop-up ads, banner ads and other forms of Internet advertising. There are ways for parents to block this kind of advertising, but as adverts get more sophisticated it gets more difficult to banish them from children’s screens.

Pop Up Ads and Banner Ads

One of the crudest forms of Internet advertising is pop up (or pop under) adverts. These open automatically in a separate onscreen window and attempt to tempt viewers to advertisers' websites. While adults can simply get rid of them right away, the methods they employ (such as bright colours and interactive game formats)make them appealing to inexperienced children. Pop under adverts work in a similar way, but hide adverts under other windows.

Banner ads are the second most popular way to advertise on the Internet. These ads appear at the edge of web pages and use music, movies and other interactive methods to attract traffic to advertisers' paid-for pages.

Luckily, both these kinds of advertising are relatively easy to block. The majority of modern browsers have settings which can automatically stop pop up advertising (and even banner ads) from reaching the screen in the first place. In addition, a variety of downloadable shareware applications have ad-blockers which can halt even advanced pop-ups. Both methods mean that computers run faster and at a reduced risk of viruses or spy ware spread by rogue ads.

More Sophisticated Adverts

Unfortunately, simply blocking ads through shareware and web browsers won’t make your computer completely advert-free.

Advertisers are developing even more sophisticated ways to reach children online that play to the medium’s strengths. For instance, video-sharing sites like YouTube have become a great way for teens to share their creative skills with those across the globe by making their own mini-movies. However, advertisers have now got on board by sponsoring online video competitions – including contests which involve designing an advert for the brand doing the sponsoring!

With methods like these advertisers are going way beyond pop up ads. They’re actively creating a new kind of marketing in which children increasingly communicate the brand benefits to each other, whether on YouTube or on social networking site like Facebook or Bebo.

Talk To Your Child

Minimising the effectiveness of techniques such as those discussed above require more than clever software. Parents need to discuss how this new kind of advertising works with their children to develop something more - a kind of ad-blocker for young minds. This may be a challenging process, but it will help children negotiate the online future without being easy prey for advertisers.