I have a list of adblockers I use, hope it helps other people here:<p>Desktop:<p>- Pi-Hole (network wide adblocking)<p>- AdGuard (device wide adblocking)<p>Web browsers:<p>- uBlock Origin<p>- uMatrix (not developed anymore but still works, can also use NoScript)<p>- SponsorBlock (blocks in-video sponsor segments, intros, outros, filler tangents, etc in YouTube)<p>Mobile:<p>- Firefox for Android / Kiwi Browser (both have web extension support so you can install uBlock Origin)<p>- YouTube Vanced (alternate YouTube app blocks ads, also has SponsorBlock)<p>- NewPipe (alternate YouTube app blocks ads, also has SponsorBlock via a fork [0], different UI than main YouTube app)<p>- YouTube++ (for iOS, similar feature set as Vanced)<p>TV:<p>- SmartTubeNext (ad-free YouTube)<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe</a>
Youtube, especially, turns into a whole different experience. Ad in front of every video makes it impossible to quickly browse and sort through videos. I might watch just a few seconds and then go to the next one. When ads are enabled, the experience is so painful that I'm not likely to use Youtube this way any more. I have to watch an ad <i>before</i> I've made the decision if I want to watch the video.
Without aggressively blocking the hundred or more ads on a webpage, I honestly don't think the web would be that useful now a days<p>Advertising has gone absolutely bonkers and filled the web with complete trash SEO farms with 40 links to some shitty slideshow<p>I don't believe the web would have caught on like it did if this current condition was v1.0<p>I wonder how much the website designer even views their own site. It's astounding anyone would approve of this. It now represents the brand as extremely low quality
I call it a malware blocker, rather than an adblocker - here's my reasoning:<p>One day I was on a classifieds site[1], browsing listings, when after a few pages, I was met with a page redirect to one of those scammy support center sites (taking over the browser), advising that my computer had been infected by a virus (obviously hadn't) and I needed to call in to "Apple's Support Center" immediately. This was on Safari (the newer useless extension-neutered version), on what I considered a reputable site. I tested again to make sure it was indeed the site that produced this, and sure enough reproduced it after browsing a few pages of listings.<p>I advised the site that they likely had a rogue advert in rotation causing this, but as usual, the blame got put on me instead, claiming that it was probably some extension (didn't have any - they're basically useless on Safari now) or it was my ISP, <i>blah blah blah</i><p>That's the day I decided to use a real browser ("If it doesn't run uBlock Origin, it's not a real browser"), so I switched to Firefox and installed uBO. This is also when I decided to call such utilities as uBO "malware blockers" rather than "ad blockers".<p>Websites can try to deflect the blame all they want[2], but in the end if visiting your website results in any attempts to compromise my computer, it's <i>your</i> site doing it as far as I'm concerned.<p>If the website industry can't regulate itself to prevent such things, then I'm going to do it myself, and I'll push back on any claims that I'm using an "ad" blocker when I'm really guarding against malware attacks.<p>[1] I'm loathe to name it since I don't recall which site it was specifically, but it was a classifieds-style site, with the reputation of, say, eBay-level recognition.<p>[2] <a href="https://www.imore.com/content-blockers-bad-ads-and-what-were-doing-about-it" rel="nofollow">https://www.imore.com/content-blockers-bad-ads-and-what-were...</a>
I stopped watching network TV in the 1990s when it reached about 25% ads (i.e. 7.5 minutes of ads in a 30 minute window. May have been only 7 minutes, memory is fuzzy now).<p>The web was a relief. You could actually consume content and tune out the (then primitive, usually just a banner at the top) ads.<p>The web, specifically un-adblocked Youtube, is now at about the same point as where I quit TV. Just not worth the aggravation any more. UBlock Origin has shifted things back into favour. But will "Manifest V3" tip things back to unbearable? We'll see.
I wanted to show a video on YouTube to a friend. He passed me his cellphone. I searched and found the video and then something very strange happened: a completely unrelated something started playing. I said "Sorry I don't know what is this. This has nothing to do with what I wanted to show you." He then explained me that was just an advertisement and the video would play soon.<p>People are used to abuse. My internet is very different from the internet most people use. I feel sorry for them.
I've started to think about it differently. I no longer use any ad blockers.
I actually want to experience the web (and its decline) the way it is, to take it all in, feel the pain and strengthen my patience in the process.<p>Also, when I visit a website that is truly obnoxious with its ads, I simply leave immediately and never go there. You build your own filter of bad actors, behaviors, and concrete sites. You don't need to block everyone, you simply walk away from abusers. You want to take notice of improper behavior before consciously and deliberately boycotting it.
On an adjacent note, my mother is someone who doesn't do any streaming—just regular old cable TV with constant commercials. I've asked her why she puts up with it and she just says the commercials give her a nice break to get up and go to the kitchen, the bathroom, do chores, etc. In reality, I think it's just inertia more than anything.<p>Recently though, she's been spending more time with my grandpa who streams everything. Last I talked to her, she said she felt very spoiled being able to watch whatever she wants, whenever she wants, with no ads. I'd tried explaining how great it is to her before, but I guess she had to live it to really understand how much better the other side is.<p>Blocking or avoiding ads in every facet of my life is almost a point of pride for me. I'm always alarmed when other people are just cool with it.
A friend (who does not use an ad blocker) showed me something on a website a few weeks ago and I was shocked by the invasiveness and aggressive nature of the ads. I asked him how he was able to use the web like this and he said it was annoying and that he was interrupted a lot, but he had sort of gotten use to it.<p>There's no way I would use a browser without an ad blocker. Doing so is counter-productive and also a major security risk.
For the longest time I refused to install an adblocker. I worked at a company that made most of its money from ads, and it felt hypocritical to run an ad blocker. Also I wanted to experience the website the same way as the users do.<p>For a long time I told people "my brain is my ad blocker I just ignore it". But after a while I just couldn't stand the web without it anymore. Websites got <i>so bad</i> I couldn't find the content anymore. My CPU would spike to 100% on some web pages and my laptop fans would spin like crazy.<p>It makes me sad but now I install an ad blocker on every place I can.
For a while I didn't bother with an adblocker. After countless data breaches and tracking that can still be done even with an adblocker, so I was mostly apathetic about the privacy factors. That was 3-4 years ago.<p>But I had a fast computer, lots of ram etc., yet still I noticed that websites were getting progressively slower and slower. And, as mentioned in the article, auto-playing video ads proliferated and became massively annoying. So I took the time to setup uBlock Origin, and gradually zapped elements on sites when they still made it through.<p>The difference was huge. Yes, the annoying auto-play ads (mostly) went away, but even more was the overall browsing speed was a huge improved. It was almost like the very early 00's when I went from dial-up to broadband.<p>It was only at this point that I realized just how much ads massively bogged down the internet.
I've had YouTube Premium since its inception. Whenever I'm around someone else who puts on a free-tier version of YouTube its rather shocking how frequent and intrusive the commercial ads are.
To answer the question posed by the site. How can they afford 261MB page load instead of 5MB? Because the largest expense of delivering video, the bandwidth, is still very cheap. We're talking less than one cent per gigabyte. Even if ad rates are really low, they're bringing in more than 1 cent per ad play.
Even if the ads weren't obnoxious and in your face, there's still the elephant in the room of malware. Every ad group has been the carrier of at least one malware ad in the last few years-- it's simply not safe to browse the web without an ad blocker.<p>The only way that'll change is if they go back to static images/text, and there's no way in hell the ad industry would ever allow that.
I have this moment when I have to use Youtube on my phone for some reason (such as a tutorial for how to fix something), and get blasted with 3 ads for a 1 minute video. I would never use it for long periods without an ad blocker.
With Chrome's crippling of adblockers via their Manifest V3 mandate, I wonder if Chrome users are in for a rude awakening of how hostile and repugnant the ad laden web has become.
I hate auto-playing videos. Several news websites in Germany embed an auto-playing video in a news article. Often these videos have nothing to do with the article. And then there are some that even turn into a pop-up player when you scroll down.<p>What's the best way to block these videos (in Chromium)? I wouldn't mind a solution where videos are completely blocked with a whitelist, since I rarely consume videos except on dedicated video sites (e.g Youtube).
An interesting thought experiment is how feasible and expensive would it be to run a large-scale PR and marketing campaign to get that 25% of adblockers to 50%, and how would this disrupt the current hegemony.<p>If you were given the task "Remove $1BN of ad revenue. Here is $100M to spend.", how would you do it? I'd imagine it could be reasonably high leverage.
At some point we need to decide as a culture to reject advertising. Stop putting ads on our own websites and apps, stop linking to sites that advertise. Either charge me money for the content or give it for free. The world will become a better place. Less compromises and capitulations to advertising companies, less mindless consumerism, less distractions. More funding for actually good content (thus a monetary incentive to create it), lower consumer prices (from less money spent on advertising).
It's almost unbelievable how big the gap is. Sometimes I try to turn it off and check links before I share them to find out if they're actually good reading experiences. I've got a couple of sites that I used to reflexively share on social media that I've since learned not to because without an adblocker they auto-play videos at the top of the page - but I never ran into that behavior when I was using them, so I thought they were fine.<p>I think that introducing nontechnical friends/family to adblockers and helping them set one up can be a really low-cost but high-impact kindness, I encourage people here to do so.<p>Maybe it's an ADHD thing and I'm overstating this, but I personally see really tangible effects on my ability to concentrate based on how many ads I'm surrounded with. Even stuff like Sponsorblock, which is honestly mostly removing intros/outros has helped a lot with how I interact with Youtube. Sure there's data savings, page load time, etc... but I also vaguely suspect that constant web advertising just flat-out affects people's mood and ability to focus more than is commonly talked about.<p>Seriously, ask your family members about whether they adblock, and install Ublock Origin for them if they don't. If they're on Android, consider (with their permission) swapping out their browser for Firefox (or some equivalent) and installing Ublock Origin again. If they don't mind some very minor UI differences (and in my experience many people don't), then it's an immediate speedup and data savings at the cost of maybe 3 minutes of work and explanation.<p>The article suggests that roughly 73% of users don't use an adblocker. Some of those users are making a conscious choice, and that's fine, but a lot of them just don't know how to install one or don't know how they work. You don't need to be actually evangelizing ad blockers to still occasionally ask someone who's complaining about ads whether or not they realize that there's a really easy way to get rid of them.
Am try to raise my 3yo daughter completely ad free. When watching a show, we exclusively use paid providers like YT, Netflix, Disney where no ads are present. Additionally, AdGuard helps removing some annoying Ads from minigame-Apps.
For now, she is very young and it doesn't matter so much. But still, I want to keep up with this as long as possible.
No free TV and no ads on web for her!
People have probably forgotten. Old media had (has) about 20% of its space (newspaper pages or media time) taken up by advertising. That was the steady state for media. I don't think it was accidental, it was the equilibrium needed to fund the media. Plus advertising frequently was one of the flashiest bits.<p>We're going to go back there, it's just going to take a few decades until the new media companies stabilize. Netflix has already started to ramp up its subscription prices, just give it some more time and more pressure to shareholders to increase revenue, ads will come and new subscription tiers will appear.<p>C'est la vie, I guess. That's who and what we are as humanity.
Schools. If you have kids that go to school chances are the teacher regularly uses youtube. Without adblockers.<p>Do everyone a favor: talk to your kid's school, the IT guys there, and have then install ublock.<p>All parents, teachers and kids will adore you.
I use Brave which somehow (not sure how) still does a much better job than whatever adblocking extensions I can find. I am also behind a PiHole firewall anyway, so most ad servers are blocked in the first place. Hundreds of websites that are completely unusable normally are completely usable as a result.
I also have NoScript installed - it significantly decreases the amount of crap your web browser fetches and renders and thus makes browsing faster and consume less energy.<p>And as mentioned by blakesterz in Private mode I have both uBlock Origin and NoScript disabled because multiple websites refuse to work otherwise.
The other thing they didn't get into here is that the quality of ads online is generally trash. In the old advertising world there was at least some thought and work put into ads. Now they are auto-generated nightmares. Check out this article from a few years ago if you want to see the worst of the worst: <a href="https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-intern...</a>
I am shocked every time I use my wife's computer and the ad blocker isnt there. I don't even understand how you could use the web on a regular basis where you have to duck, dodge, and weave better than Ali to avoid some type of disturbance.
I have friends who still don't use some sort of adblocking, no fucking idea how they browse websites without it in 2022. Anytime I've had to use a computer without uBlock Origin, they are horrible to use.<p>Now I just recommend everyone Ublock Origin :)
"But I think without the help of an adblocker I would find it much worse."<p>Not at all. Because I don't use an adblocker, I don't visit websites that are infested with ridiculous numbers of ads. These sites are not worth reading anyway. I read sites I pay for, I go to my bank, I pay bills, I read Haskell API docs, etc etc.<p>If I used an adblocker, I'd waste even more time on Internet garbage.
The site appears to be hugged to death...but the thrust of the idea seems pretty obvious on the surface...I'd add that it also probably follows financial, if not technically savvy groups.<p>The person with a $50 Walmart Burner phone's experience will be a WHOLE LOT DIFFERENT from the person with the $1100 smartphone with ad blocking turned on.
If companies chose to run simple, clean, quiet advertisements there would be no need to block ads. They have only themselves to blame for creating a nightmare user experience.
I have never used an add blocker. If the page is too intrusive with toxic adds, I just close the page. Also, if I go to any page that launches a pop-up to subscribe or some other stupid crap, I again just close the page, never to return.<p>I wish more people would do this.
I'm in some weird Facebook limbo where I get zero ads (native app, browser with adblock turned off, etc.) Please don't tell Mark<p>My wife is blown away when she sees my feed. It's like we've been using completely different apps for years.
I got so used to having uBlock that I couldn't relate to the memes about YouTube adding multiple unskippable ads recently. I'm like "they did?". It <i>is</i> like I browse a different web and it's awesome.
"I’ve been browsing the web with an adblocker for so long that I’d totally forgotten about the existence of ads being spliced into video content"<p>Relatable. YouTube Vanced is a bigger feature for Android than iMessage is for iOS.
Yep, I had a weird experience at a friends house when his smart TV youtube was playing ads every few minutes, while I was trying to listen to the Dead. Really killed my vibe maan. Apparently it's the uploader's fault for choosing to monetise.<p>I cannot tolerate ads at all now. Part of my issue with them is that you have no control over what you are being shown, obviously. It's the same problem with all the new social media platforms, in general. Anything can popup. And once you've seen something, to cant unsee it.
Open ended question, is there a solution? Inherently people trying to make money from their website either have to charge people directly with money for access or indirectly by having them see/hear ads. Advertisers inherently want their ads to be seen/heard, which means there is pressure to make their ads more intrusive. Yet the more intrusive the ads become, the more annoyed the person accessing the content becomes (and thus perhaps becomes more likely to get an ad blocker). The more people that block ads, the more the website needs to make from each person who isn't blocking ads (likely meaning additional pressure to make ads more intrusive). What path are we headed down? What happens when so many people are blocking ads that the amount of value needed to be extracted from those who don't block ads is impossible to achieve? Does the internet consolidate more?<p>I personally use ad blockers. Right now I'm browsing with Ghostery and AdBlock. I'm surprised that only 27% of people use them currently. Makes me want to check out my parents computers when I visit next and make sure they have an ad blocker installed. But back to the questions, does this mean that the contract between websites their visitors is inherently broken? Is the current situation a race to the bottom? Is that tenable? What's the alternative?
Curious - why does Youtube not figure out how to outsmart ad blockers? Is it technically not possible to embed ads into the video such that the ad blocker cannot detect it?
I started watching Adam Curtis' Century of the Self [1] recently, then decided to fact check [2]. Curtis makes out Sigmund Freuds nephew Edward Louis Bernays as the inventor of modern advertising, but he exaggerates for effect as usual. I've been a fan of busting ads for a long time, at least since I learned as a boy that I was being psychologically manipulated.<p><i>We're an activist hub and the headquarters of Adbusters magazine, the journal of the mental environment. Since 1989, our international collective of artists, designers, writers, musicians, poets, punks, philosophers and wild hearts has been smashing ads, fighting corruption and speaking truth to power.</i> [3]<p>[1] The Century of the Self - Part 1: "Happiness Machines"<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.adbusters.org/about-us" rel="nofollow">https://www.adbusters.org/about-us</a>
If Google priced Premium to replace the very small revenue they must receive for adverts (at least for the small amount I use YouTube), that would be one thing. But they're asking for a lot more.<p>Two parents w 6 Google logins between them (2 personal, 4 work entities) and 4 kids, each w a personal and school account.
This would require 14 YouTube Premium accounts. Um...no.
Ad blocking is a security issue. When web sites start taking responsibility for their ad content, we can have a discussion on if it is "theft" or not. As long as they farm their ads out to third party providers and wash their hands of any of the security implications and responsibilities, I will continue to block them.
I use ublock and have setup a dns blocker through openwrt and have even added my own items to the blacklist. I am astoundished how much traffic leaves my machine "just sitting there".<p>At this point my blocklist has something like 77.614 domains blocked and I do not believe that its going to get less.<p>what is intersting is that I grew up with the uncensored internet and the things i found are not on the list of things that I definitly will block for my children.<p>Its kind of the opposite approach of a censored web for children because to be honest im not so much worried about their activities, but far more concious of the bad actors out there.
I always had adblocker since I got internet, someone told me to use it to reduce my internet bill when I paid per Mb. I always had AdBlock+ , it was the first thing I installed on my PC, always. I started seeing people complaining on too many ads on random websites and youtube, but I never noticed YT had ads until I saw discussions on it on reddit. Now I'm full time adblocker, Brave, µblock and DNS ad-blocks in OpenWRT.<p>I think my habits and me installing adblockers for everyone resulted in worse web for everyone else, the more people block ads, the more ads there will be for the rest.
Better yet, go all the way in with No script and experience an even better email. A lot faster, too. Enabling us even on a handful of sites has a measurable impact on battery life on underpowered devices such as phones.<p>HN is working perfectly fine without js. For obvious reasons, most non video/chat/app sites work just fine as well.<p>I write us for a living so I'm not against in the least. It works for me.<p>My mind is blown every time I see what regular people experience. Horrible, though I am not sure it's worse than what we had to deal with back in the flash and days a decade ago. Could be.
Aside from the manipulative and downright unproductive type of economy we are left with, how much energy (in terms of Wh) is wasted by video ads? Energy doesn’t lie, even if a publisher can seemingly offset their costs with a CDN. The real trouble is that energy pricing is not correlated with total cost of production in most countries. Could energy pricing that accounted for pollution, resource depletion as well as the production cost itself, help us as a species in removing such counterproductive businesses?
It would be nice if we had the option to ask for $1 to our visitors, but we don't because the credit card and payments racket works its magic. Just what are websites supposed to do to survive? Shutting down is not a valid answer<p>Of course the #1 culprits are the advertisers themselves, because they don't care about their craft, they are lazy and just push all their money to google. But the web should be like an arcade machine where people can pay to get content, and current regulation makes that impossible
The only reason I occasionally use an adblocker is to try to experience the web how what seems like a sizable subset of users experience it, for that shared experience. Honestly, the two don't seem that different in most cases outside of the worst ad-ridden sites.<p>Side-note: I don't run ads on any of the sites I manage, yet deal with dozens of bug reports each year as adblockers aggressively find new ways to break sites. IME, ad blockers are about as much as a nuisance as the ads themselves.
Until a decade ago, I've always tried to be the better person. I did not block ads and for sites that I liked, I even intentionally clicked on ads.<p>I can tolerate ads. Also 10 on a page. And they can even blink. What I cannot tolerate is malware, personal data theft, and ads destroying the performance of any website. Ads have become a liability and advertisers have made it loud and clear that I'm not a human being, instead a resource to be exploited, and no tactic is below their standards.
PiHole is the first thing I install on my network and configure it as DNS via DHCP.<p>Makes everything bearable. It doesn't get rid of every ad, but it still lightens the load.
I experience this on my phone where adblock doesn't work that well. It's absolutely horrible to use the web there. The screen is already small, and then it gets filled with overlays getting me to use an app, ads, autoplaying videos, ...<p>I'm at the point where my phone is just an alarm, instant messenger and casual camera, since other apps are also full of annoying ads.
Frankly I have no problem with ads that are simple (text/images/untracked). The ad industry has made it clear they would rather be utterly obnoxious and creepy so <i>therefore</i> as far as I’m concerned they can wither and die.<p>Firefox+addons seem to work best for blocking ads which is why I am increasingly concerned about that browser being marginalized.
I've used adblockers since they were invented and rarely experience the unfiltered internet.<p>In recent years, though, I've wondered if it might actually be better to turn that all off. Are we adblockers just getting a more purified stream of clickbait "news" and enraging social media posts, without the ads there to remind us that it's all trash?<p>I suspect so.
I remember one time I was talking about web ads with a few friends and said something along the lines of 'you have to be stupid as fuck not to use an adblocker on the internet these days' and literally 3 out of 5 people immediately popped up and said they don't use them. All were using one within a week, lol.
I don't use any "ad blocker" plugins, but I do use EFF's Privacy Badger, which blocks all cookies it determines are tracking cookies. Many websites deduce it'ss blocking their ads, because they're addicted to tracking us, but I feel no guilt. I wouldn't risk browsing without it.
What I find interesting is that in my experience people with lots of add blocking are more likely to pass on HORRIBLE links. They don't know and thus pass on garbage sites (full of ads and such) where the folks I know without ad blockers are more careful of what they subject their friends to.<p>It's a weird situation.
I doubt very much the author experiences the web he claims to. There are many websites that requires ad blockers to be disabled, and unless you really don't care about a large part of the web (incidentally, the one he's talking about, the one with ads), there's no way to get that experience.
I have no Adblock on my phone and it’s unbelievable how many ads some sites put up.<p>Many times I have to hunt for the second half of the article past five or six full image ads and sponsored content.<p>This feels like a death spiral - the more Adblock the more ads they’ll put up to get seen by a smaller segment of users.
I wish I had a better way to support content sites without paying for individual websites. I’m guessing this would never happen, but I would definitely pay a single monthly fee to get access to all the major news sites and if it helped ensure some level of journalistic integrity.
Adblock on my openwrt router is like my bare minimum to surf the web. I’m aware of pi-holes and per device ad blocking via add-ins/vpns/whatever but it’s so dead simple to handle this at the gateway level it’s difficult to imagine doing it any way else.
I have Ad-block but still see a lot of Ads. I started to shun certain websites (major news sites particularly) a while ago. The only occasions I turn it off is when I legitimately believe that authors deserve a bit of extra revenue from Ads.
I'm very curious what would happen if Apple suddenly announced that for the next version of Safari (20% of browser market share when combining mobile and desktop), adblocking would be included and ask the user if they want it on.
The real question is, if you are going to autoplay a huge video is do video ad units perform better than anything else? Last I looked, video ads were pretty cheap, and didn't have good stories on conversion. Has that changed?
I haven't seen an ad on the internet in at least a decade so this sounds about right.<p>My mom recently somehow managed to disable the ad-blocker I have setup on her computer and was blown away by how much advertising is on the internet.
>autoplaying videos<p>I'm still looking for a block list that simply removes all video content from various franchise and local news sites. It is rarely actually relevant to the article, and is often vastly less information dense.
As to the reason it's worth it, here are a couple of reasons:<p>When legacy media companies sell ad space, often they do not do so through an auction mechanism but through a direct purchase model. That means someone paid anywhere from a few hundred to thousands to be on that page. That gives them more of a client relationship and so they can feel more burdened to make sure advertising clients get 'visibility' and bang for their buck.<p>Also, they can sell ads in their videos with estimated view/impression counts. If they autoplay, the view count goes up even if you're not watching the video so an unsophisticated ad consumer thinks the ad spend is justified.<p>I don't run ad campaigns anymore, but I did for eight years and I always preferred no autoplay because intentional viewing is much more valuable for what I was selling.<p>Use adblock.
The reason I use an ad blocker and noscript is because focused reading is impossible without these countermeasures. It's as if they don't want me to read and pay attention what they wrote.
Yeah it is quite a jarring experience when Adblocking breaks for whatever reason.<p>Actually built a small internal api end point that checks whether filtering works every 60s and that goes onto status tracker (Kuma)
Vaguely related: I’ve been using NextDNS for a while now, and it’s wonderful. I subscribed to a paid plan just to support the company. Recommended, if you haven’t already checked them out.
I swear the ad industry are in bed with cellular operators. Data usage from ads taps directly into peoples data plans, why would not there exist a kickback scheme for this?
I used to use adblockers but then certain websites stopped working and displayed banners saying to turn of my adblocker, so i did, and then it all seemed kind of pointless.
I find the EFF Privacy Badger to be a nice compromise: <a href="https://privacybadger.org/" rel="nofollow">https://privacybadger.org/</a>
This may be an extreme take, but recently I've been removing websites with Google Analytics et al. from my bookmarks. If the user is not being respected when it comes to tracking what that does hint at when it comes to content?
> I would imagine margins are pretty thin these days if you run a magazine website. Advertising revenue isn’t what is used to be and the money they make for each visitor is probably the lowest it has ever been<p>Webmasters need to diversify their income streams. Obviously AD revenue doesn't cut it anymore. You need to implant affiliate links, do paywalls, paid subscriptions to content, and sell merch on a Shopify-powered site that is separate from the main magazine/blog. Ghacks for example sells software and services on their deals subdomain[0], but I'm not sure if it's that profitable.<p>[0] <a href="https://deals.ghacks.net/" rel="nofollow">https://deals.ghacks.net/</a>
What will be the long term consequences of majority of us using AdBlocks? And who will fill the void when running a website is economically unfeasible?<p>Think of it like this : a majority of well respected publications are behind paywalls ; so people are consuming information from Facebook memes or WhatsApp posts or worse. And we know how well that is going for us as a society?<p>YouTube ads are freaking annoying. But I know that the creators of those channels I watch depend on those to make a decent living and overwhelming majority of them are not rich.
No one has linked <a href="https://xkcd.com/624" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/624</a> yet? It's straight on target.
In FireFox I have my ad blockers disabled in Private Mode so nothing is getting in the way if I'm testing or some site is being weird. Sometimes it's SHOCKINGLY different how a page looks with the blockers in place. I really can't believe anyone would user a browser without an ad blocker if they knew how things would look while using one. The web is a much better place with a blocker in place.<p>(Yes, I know, we get a huge amount of amazing "free" content thanks to the ads and assorted trackers and other garbage out there)
"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you."<p>- Banksy
Ads are such a strange cancer on the internet. So ugly, so without value, such a waste of time, such a sinkhole of precious attention.<p>And yet -- would the modern internet even exist but for ads? I'm not so sure.<p>It seems there is a bifurcation, even among those of us with the technical know-how and resources to live ad-free lives: those who tolerate ads, and those who do not.<p>I count myself in the latter group. I will be happiest if I go the rest of my life and never see another ad, in any form, again. I will go to great lengths and expense to avoid them. It is self-evident to me that they are toxic, to my own psychology, at least.<p>The dichotomy brings to mind the "edit streams" in Neal Stephenson's latest, Fall: an internet essentially stratified by class. Who has the money and resources to filter the shit out and who doesn't.
Server may have melted into a left-handed puddle:<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220131163244/https://imlefthanded.com/2022/adblocking-people-and-non-adblocking-people-experience-a-totally-different-web/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20220131163244/https://imlefthan...</a>
Yeah, why would you not be entitled to that content for no commercial consideration…<p>Frankly I don’t understand the ethical position of people who use ad-blockers.
Well I'll tell you more: if you're not buying anything from the website <i>and</i> you're blocking ads, then you're not the target audience and your opinion is irrelevant to the site's owners. You're just burning electricity and occupying the CPU.<p>Which means that by using an ad-blocker, people are removing themselves from the audience that has any vote in how content sites develop. You're miffed that sites are becoming dumber while ads are all over the place and uglier every day? You don't like video ads, modal calls-to-action and dark patterns? Well, the audience that actually brings in the money seems to have no problem with all of that, so ad-blocking people will proceed to take a hike right past the attention of site designers.
It's interesting working for a large employer that relies on ad revenue. Among employees there's understanding that ad blocking bites into our revenue. I'm sure some of the employees use ad blockers themselves, though. And when we get customer complaints about the site acting wonky, they're pretty open about using ad blocking. Sometimes it's possible that the ad blocker itself is what causes the issue. There are be a couple of opinions that folks that use ad blockers are on their own and that we won't cater to them, but the more dominant position is that the people complaining are our most active users and help drive engagement, so there's still a strong argument for the site working well in a "degraded" (ad-blocked) mode.<p>There's still a sweet spot to aim for that is ad-compatible. For one thing, limit CLS, because I think content that jumps around due to ads has got to be one of the biggest drivers toward reaching for an ad blocker.<p>Also, some widely-used ad systems are not all that compatible with single-page apps. (Looking at you, gpt.js.) Even if you call their cleanup methods after destroying an ad, you'll have a memory leak on the browser side if you don't completely reload the page/app. So users complain about the SPA "bogging down" as they use it, and they'll often (correctly, even if accidentally) blame the ads. So the ad systems have got to buckle down and fix their own problems if they don't want to drive users toward ad blockers.