Surely I am not the first to be reeled in by an enticing blog title only to then be bombarded by hordes of online pop ups and adverts. The internet has become a battle ground for advertisers but it is the reason we can view online content for free… with the right subscription.

I’ll be honest the logistics behind it are amazing, studies show the first six seconds are vital to retaining the attention of your targeted audience, and some pop ups you can’t close for six seconds.

Someone is a genius!

YouTube videos have adverts continuously popping up throughout the video, annoying but clever when the majority of the pop ups are based on your search history.

Google gets 90% of its revenue from online ads, and mobile ads make up 73% of Facebook’s ad revenue. But what does the advertiser get? How valuable are “impressions”? I know I spend most of my time closing ads without even acknowledging who is trying to sell to me.

According to some estimates, 144 million people globally used an ad blocker last year, and that was up 70 percent year on year. Still another 7 billion people to target and after recently launching an Ad campaign on twitter and LinkedIn, it all seems pretty cheap and a single conversion could be the ROI we need.

TV killed the radio and the World Wide Web made everyone a journalist. But how threatened are publishers, search engines and social media sites if readers can opt out of the ads?