This is a good point, and the fact that advertisers don't allow it is evidence that they're doing something immoral. If adverts were really about informing people to help them make their own reasoned choices, advert search would be very useful. But if adverts are an attempt to emotionally manipulate people, then allowing search would be counterproductive. It would give the audience time to think, which makes psychological trickery less effective. Advertisers choosing to make adverts appear and disappear unpredictably is telling.
I don't think it's that deep. The advertiser, the ad buyer (some digital agency), the ad deliverer (some exchange or third-party network) and the publisher (the site where the ad was displayed) are all distinct entities with budgets fired up and ready to go at that specific moment.
The advertiser would surely love for you to search for their ad again (and again, and again). The buyer wouldn't mind, if only to show that their placement has increased reach. But the deliverer or the publisher won't see any additional revenues off of this, therefore there's zero incentive for them to support it.
If the small site owners are only collateral damage for you then you also welcome a internet which is dominated by big companies and people with enough money to push their agenda.
But advertising has led to the collapse of the small business or hobby website. Realistically nobody will ever see your content unless you advertise heavily, or post on a platform that uses your content to sell its ads.
Advertising, as far as I can see, has had a negative impact on the democracy of the web. And lead to an increase in the domination of big platform holders and brands.
Care to elaborate why this should happen? Do you believe the "Google will rank you bad if you don't use Adsense" conspiracy theorie?
Adblockers have become the norm because large enough a fraction of ad pushers have no morals. And because the ad industry tends to be concentrated, the blockers (rightly) target the observed ways used to push the ads.
So if you use any of the blacklisted firehoses or their observed methods, you can expect to be blocked.
> Seriously, we have a single unobtrusive banner yet 85% of our users are adblocking; it's not an issue of 'bad ads' as so many like to argue.
If 85% of your users have decided to use adblockers, I would take that a clear signal that the resources you use for serving ads have been deemed obnoxious in the extreme.
YOU may not be shoveling unripened-manure-quality-ads to your users, but other parties in the business who use the same services obviously do. And before we go to the concept of whitelisting certain sites, please realise that there are still two major factors working against you.
1: An ad served will mean successful tracking. Sophisticated users refuse to give in here.
2: The moment some whitelisting method becomes easy, useful and accepted, the ad networks will do everything they can to abuse that to bypass blockers. This follows from human nature and ruthless business practises.
And finally, I'm going to throw something I wrote nearly two years ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10521930 - that's my list of things that would qualify an ad as non-intrusive.