Tips to get rid of online ads on sites

As users flock the internet by the millions, it is a marketing bonanza for companies that wish to sell their products and services.

Many websites rely on advertisements for their revenue.

However there are other sites that have more advertisements than actual content.

Sometimes, advertising companies track all our online activities and read our personal emails to serve targeted advertisements.

Some people may consider this a breach of privacy.

In our country, internet bandwidth is scarce and most of us have limited internet connections; there are some advertisements that use heavy graphics and animation that hog our bandwidth and make our pages less responsive. Here are a few solutions to this problem.

1) Opt out of Personalized Ads: Google has the lion’s share in the online advertising industry and gives users the option to opt out of targeted ads by going to www.google.com/settings/ads and clicking on the ‘Opt Out’ button. Enabling this option would display only generic ads.

2) Browser Based Blocking: Adblockplus.­org is a website that supplies add-ons for browsers like Chrome, Firefox, etc. This add-on automatically stops ads from showing up on your browser. It also prevents those annoying popup ads that distract. Ad Block plus is also available for Android.

3) Software solution: Browser based ad blockers need to be downloaded and configured for each and every browser. If you want to block advertisements system-wide, Privoxy is a popular free and open source solution that can be downloaded from Privoxy.org. Privoxy is available for Windows, Linux and Mac platforms. It completely hides all ads from showing up.

(The writer is  blogger, gadget lover and quizzer)