How would you feel when you find someone continuously stalking you? What if that someone isn’t a human at all? In today’s digital age, humans aren’t the only culprits of stalking. Surprisingly, we have a new stalker in town, and it is more creepy and persistent. Well, I am talking about the ever-so-creepy, online adverts.
There’s nothing more infuriating then running into a big ad banner as soon as we visit a website. We get furious when we look around for that little cross to finally exit that annoying ad. Shockingly, the insanity doesn’t end there, but keeps on creeping us out, even more, when we see the advertisements of the same product or service tailing us on every website we visit, and even our inbox.
Online ads are surely very creepy and annoying. However, the annoyance escalates even more, especially, during sales seasons such as Black Friday when we spend long hours on the Internet, hunting for discounts and coupons.
The good news is that you can prevent and block these annoying ads from following you and ruining your browsing experience.
Best Ways to Prevent Online Ads
Let’s check out some of the most useful tricks to stop online ads from stalking us.
Kill. Destroy. Obliterate Cookies
Cookies are the primary culprit behind “targeted ads” that continuously follow us on every website we visit, and make way for junk emails. Tracking cookies keep complete information of the user’s past behavior and searches.
Suppose that you visit an apparel website. You navigate to some of its categories and browse through the catalog of your choice. The moment you exit the website, the ads of the same product or category of the same website will start following you. You would see the ads cramming the entire left and right columns of the screen. Sometimes, you would see the annoying ads right in the middle of an article or blog post.
To kill off these irksome ads, you should clear the cookies every once in a while. Deleting cookies is easy. Head straight to the browser settings, go to Cookies section and eliminate it for good. Some browsers also lets you control whether websites can save cookies or not.
Set up Browser’s Pop-up Blocker
Although all types of online adverts are irritating, the horrible ones are those that pop up and block the entire screen. These ads ruin the browsing experience completely, and such ads often make us exit the website.
Luckily, browsers like Google Chrome come with the mechanism to blocks pop-up ads. To set up the pop-up blocker on Chrome, go to Settings and Pop-ups. Now, go to content settings and then Popup. Toggle off that Allow Popup feature.
It is essential to keep in mind that the built-in pop-up blocker of Chrome isn’t as effective as it should be and it often fails to block some pop-ups.
PureVPN Offers the Ideal Ad-blocker Add-on
Deleting cookies every time you visit a website or working with a weak built-in pop-up blocker is annoying in itself. Well, these hacks can be considered best in some cases but not ideal.
If you want a perfect solution to ad blocking, you might want to give PureVPN a try. As the name suggests, it is a virtual private network service provider that encrypts your data and gives you the ability to anonymize your browsing activities.
The VPN provider also comes with a powerful ad-blocker add-on that keeps annoying ads out of the reach of your device. With the ad-blocker feature enabled on PureVPN, you save yourself from the hassles of deleting cookies or installing unreliable ad blockers. Plus, you also get some of the fantastic features that make your overall browsing experience more pleasant.
Some of the more prominent features of PureVPN include:
- URL Filter and Ad Blocker
- Antimalware and IDS/IPS
- 2,000+ Encrypted VPN Server
- 300,000+ IPs and Unlimited Bandwidth
- IKS and Split Tunneling
- And more.
So, if you want the unique combo of a VPN and ad-blocker, you should check PureVPN ‘s Black Friday VPN deal out today.
Daniel Kiss is the senior editor for News Lair. Daniel was working as a writer since he finished high-school, first for local papers then he started online, nowadays he likes to write about the latest games and tech innovations.