Conor Brophy: The long-term consequences of ad-blocking could be less diversity and inferior content

Blocking online ads may offer a short-term gain to users, but at the price of long-term pain for the content they love and the sites that provide it.

A white paper published by the US National Bureau for Economic Research identifies what it calls the “ad block paradox”. Users install the software because they don’t want to see annoying ads and so they can better enjoy their browsing experience, but in so doing ...