Investigation shows ad blockers don’t just block ads – they block images, shopping carts & even entire websites
An investigation by Fortune into the effects of iOS ad blockers showed that they don’t just block ads (and thus prevent sites like ours from paying the bills), they also block images, prevent items from being added to shopping carts and in some cases block entire websites. The problem was first identified by ecommerce specialist Chris Mason.
Lots of sites will be missing content, have broken links or customers won’t be able to add certain items to their shopping carts. They’ll probably just think the site is broken, but it’s really their content blocker.
On the Bass Pro Shops site, product images were missing. On Lululemon, you could see product images but attempts to add products to shopping carts failed, and on sites like Sears and Walgreens, either the homepage or product pages were blocked entirely.
If you do choose to press ahead with ad blockers despite such issues, we encourage you to whitelist those sites whose content you enjoy to ensure that they are able to continue to provide free content.
