This is what pisses me off about ads based on user tracking and surveillance the most. Google (and others) have been building very detailed profiles of us for two decades now and the ads still suck.
The ads that work are the ones that pop up when you search for a particular topic (e.g. "plumbers in austin"). They don't need a user profile to serve those.
I'm not happy if I'm reading a tech blog and I see ads for a car I was researching yesterday. I'm not happy if I'm checking my local newspaper's website and I see ads for the necklace I just bought my wife. These are like the non-chill guy who loudly approaches you at work, "HEY I HEAR YOU'RE LOOKING FOR A NEW JOB!".
Context is important.
If everybody used a DNS blocker to filter out ads, would online advertising exist as a business?
Absolutely. Companies would get more clever about cloaking advertising with inscrutable domain names that's hard to filter with regex. Youtube is a good example of ads that are hard to block using pure DNS. (But that doesn't stop people from trying new variations of regexes for pihole that youtube eventually breaks.[0])
The other technique is native advertising. (But native ads are actually more "relevant" so somewhat more tolerable and more people would actually pay attention to them.) E.g. I just saw a Linus Tech Tips (the computer tech channel) and the pre-roll ad is for D-CON mouse traps (not relevant to me since I don't have a mouse infestation that requires rodent traps) or girls dolls[1] -- but the native ad is Linus acting as spokesperson for the Ring Doorbell Camera Kit[2]. That's more relevant since it's a techie gadget. I won't buy the Ring kit but it's more relevant than the mouse trap ad.
[0] last time I tried many of these DNS regex ideas, youtube stopped working: https://www.google.com/search?q=pihole+regex+block+youtube+a...
[1] ads for girls dolls probably ignored by 99% of audience demographic of Linus' video: https://imgur.com/a/gPcxOJ3
Something tells me that still won’t be enough to have you undo ad blocking...
I like ads -- but only if they're relevant to my interests. There lies the problem: 99% of all ads are not relevant to my interests. For online ads, 99.99% of ads are not relevant to me. So, I use a DNS blocker to filter out ads.