Run some apps with Little Snitch turned on and you see the same thing. Tons of outbound requests to domains that I have never heard of and have no idea what they want on my machine.
I just block everything with reckless abandon. I don't give a shit if my "experience" is degraded.
Frankly, with small kids in the house who I would like to protect to the extent I am able... I am considering installing Pi Hole and whatever else I can find in addition to the spartan whitelist I've set up for them to use via parental controls.
I will say that the installation process can be somewhat painful if you deviate from the norm. I didn't want to use Google DNS and instead opted for OpenDNS, plus I wanted my own directory structure, etc...
http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
Disabled all ad-blockers and still don't get ads, and the whole experience seems faster. Presumably it takes longer for JavaScript-based utilities to block ads compared to just blackholing them in the hosts file? Anyway, might get a Raspberry Pi or just use an old small form-factor PC with it's own DNS server running the same list.
It then installs an updater via cron to check for updated lists every week.
As to your experience with speed, I'm kind of surprised. The only time I noticed a speed difference is when I blackholed domains in the hosts file that didn't resolve to a valid web server (i.e. resolving to 127.0.0.1 without having a web server running), and that's the opposite of what you describe. The pi-hole script also installs lighttpd to serve up a placeholder page, and uses some tricks like mod_expire to improve performance.
Little Snitch is basically a user-friendly general-purpose application Firewall. When a connection hasn't been whitelisted before, it pop up a dialog box allowing you to accept/reject connection to a host/domain/port permanently/temporarily.
uMatrix does not protect you against 'malicious' connections initiated by non-browser applications. Little Snitch does not provide the fine-grained URI-level filtering that uBlock/uMatrix provide.
Edit: if you have a Mac, Little Snitch is well-worth the money. It is very polished, does the job, and the developers are not greedy (I think I purchased an update once after I started using it in 2007 or 2008).
It's one of the first things I install on my Macs. Worth every penny.
Disclaimer: I made it.
I want people to get paid--really I do--but I'm not stepping barefoot into a cesspool of web cruft to do it. Blockers are like putting boots on so you can wade through it safely. Clean up your mess and I don't mind going barefoot.
They sound as though they're trying to accommodate 'us', but the proof will be in what the 'ad-free' experience is really like. I wonder if they're considered a paid RSS feed as an alternative - that would certainly solve much of the issue for many.
Simple static ads would render most of these concerns unnecessary, but I doubt there's any incentive to go back to that kind of "outdated" advertising.
In my opinion it's due to the fact that ads became very intrusive lately - video, audio, flash, popups, fullscreen overlays, endless scripts, you name it.
I don't know the solution to fix this mess, but I will gladly help pop the current bubble so something more useful can replace it.
There is also common banner dimensions that get blocked, but it is easy to defeat by adding a pixel somewhere that fits into site design.
Problem with this approach is that you can't just slap some random ad network script there and be done with it, no targeted ads, tracking etc - basically everything people don't like and a reason to use ad blockers.
EDIT: rephrase
What I object to is the cesspool of unidentifiable tracking and god-knows-what-else crud.
heck i block ads as a side effect of blocking things like Google analytics.
Never mind even getting hacked. Ad providers routinely violate the trust of content providers by activating audio, throwing up full screen overlays and who knows what else. I'm not an expert but I'm given to understand that it's hard for content providers to quality control these sort of ads. The whole delivery system is gamed to a ridiculous degree.
Publishers want ads but don't want to actually do the job of selling them; ads used to be free money, and this is coming to an end.
Ads from their own domain would be a little harder to block, especially because blocking would have to be done on a page-by-page basis (or at least, website-by-website).
I see, of course, that I'm likely not representing the majority of adblock users.
The marketers buy the hype and want all of that. "If I take this pretty chart from here, and that table that from there, and these numbers from over here, I can make a really impressive report!"
And they want to make sure that they're collecting all the data they could possibly be collecting (because they never know when they might suddenly need the last 6 months data about something they never thought of), even though they don't know what queries they want to be able to make.
So they make the developers add all of them, end up with tons of data but very little information, and start talking about 'this big data thing' that could maybe give them answers even though they still don't know what questions they want to ask. And to use it, you just have to add this little snippet of javascript...
No thanks.
when a site gets hacked, you get malicious content regardless you block ads or not.
Nit: Those aren't top-level domains. TLDs are things like com, net, org, uk, io, etc. More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-level_domain
After adding 19 separate exceptions in uMatrix for both whole domains and for types of requests/actions on domains, I still don't see any ads but I do see an ever-increasing list of third-party sites Wired is pulling requests from. Given a choice between throwing up my hands and saying "Fine, f*ckit, do whatever the hell you want" and whitelisting Wired's requests to all of (disqus, optimizely, amazon-adsystem, condenastdigital, demdex, typekit, adobetm, chartbeat, cloudfront, doubleclick, googleadservices, googlesyndication, googletagservices, mediavoice, mookie1, omtrdc, outbrain, parsely, scorecardresearch, yldbt and zqtk) plus whatever others would be pulled in were I actually to whitelist, I guess I'll have to do without Wired.
So far without ever actually loosening things up far enough to see ads that's AT LEAST 21 different top-level domains Wired is pulling from, not counting its own (and yes, I realize it's part of Conde Nast). Most of those top-level domains have at least 2 subdomains being pulled from, sometimes more. My basic reaction to this is that even if I trust Wired and Conde Nast, I don't know that I trust all those other sites like "mookie1," "yldbt," "zqtk" and whatever other obscurely-named domains.
Frankly, were I to see "yldbt" or "zqtk" as a running process or folder name on a system I was working on, I'd immediately rename them and start virus and malware scans.
So I guess my reading of Wired online will suffer much the same fate as my reading of Wired on paper, because while I like seeing occasional items from Wired it's not a daily destination for me, and I'm certainly not coughing up $50+/year for it.