Re:Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detecti...
by danaris on Saturday October 28, 2023 @03:28PM
(#38052663)
See, here's the thing:
By and large, we don't especially feel the need to block ads that aren't interfering with us. Back when Google's ad business was fairly new, they did simple text ads that stayed out of the way, and they made plenty of money on it.
If that was what the vast majority of ads were today, I probably wouldn't even bother with an adblocker.
But these days there are pop-ups, and pop-overs, and pop-unders, and autoplaying videos that follow me as I scroll the page (and which, on mobile, hide about 1/3 of the content I'm there to see).
And even if I could deal with those annoyances, there are vast swathes of ad networks today that need to be avoided at all costs, because they host drive-by downloads, page redirects, and every other kind of spam, scam, and malware you can imagine.
We didn't start this war. The ad industry did. If they had been content to make a decent profit while enabling other websites to do the same, we wouldn't be in this mess. But they just had to try and squeeze every last drop of attention and money out of us.
So, we will fight for a right to block ads. And if giant chunks of the web end up being financially unsustainable because the ad business collapses entirely, that is not on us.
By and large, we don't especially feel the need to block ads that aren't interfering with us. Back when Google's ad business was fairly new, they did simple text ads that stayed out of the way, and they made plenty of money on it.
If that was what the vast majority of ads were today, I probably wouldn't even bother with an adblocker.
But these days there are pop-ups, and pop-overs, and pop-unders, and autoplaying videos that follow me as I scroll the page (and which, on mobile, hide about 1/3 of the content I'm there to see).
And even if I could deal with those annoyances, there are vast swathes of ad networks today that need to be avoided at all costs, because they host drive-by downloads, page redirects, and every other kind of spam, scam, and malware you can imagine.
We didn't start this war. The ad industry did. If they had been content to make a decent profit while enabling other websites to do the same, we wouldn't be in this mess. But they just had to try and squeeze every last drop of attention and money out of us.
So, we will fight for a right to block ads. And if giant chunks of the web end up being financially unsustainable because the ad business collapses entirely, that is not on us.