What I think I'm starting to understand is that ads have their own infrastructure and they can be blocked as such. In this infrastructure is data mining/trading, user profiling, and ad bidding. I find all of this disgusting. The kind of ads I don't mind are not noticed by adblocking. That is product mention and product placement on a site that the content provider puts there. Is it too much for content providers and advertisers to put something in place that isn't this cluterfuck bot that throttles the web?
I recently started running an ad blocker again, after a number of years without one. Why? Because an advert was using so much CPU that it was interfering with my browsing in other tabs and running down my laptop battery.<p>This is a problem across web design. Web developers seem to have forgotten (or have slowly been forgetting for years) that huge amounts of javascript has a noticeable impact on the users computer. If I don't intentionally stop javascript executing on some pages the resulting CPU usage will drain my battery in half the normal time.
It seems like an odd business decision to make every pageview begin with the equivalent of "Are you sure you <i>really</i> want to view our content?"