For better or worse, the web and all of its benefits, was built on advertising.Īds can be intrusive, even dangerous, but they're what pays for your modern entertainment, information and communication. Unless you're supporting Google Contributor or some other micropayment scheme, you're financially hurting content providers. I hope you enjoy Wikipedia and I hope you donated to their cause. Don't want ads on your computer screen? Then you should only visit sites without advertising. You don't have the right to content for free. Everybody gets to decide what appears on their computer screen and in what form. There's no ethical issue with ad blockers. I'm not sure my ancient MBP would be able to function as a browsing machine with it, which makes me wonder about just how much increase in CPU performance has been eaten up by clock thieves such as the tracking companies. The rest I let through - Ghostery is fantastic for this. I've never minded seeing banner ads, or ads on the side, as in newspapers, but what I object to is the trackers, the screen-possessors, the noisemakers. Aside from ads in podcasts, I can't think of a single time an ad has actually captured my attention or resulted in a sale. Now that I've done it, it's going to take an enormous effort to get me to stop. I've mentioned it before, but seeing gifts I was researching for my spouse show up as ads on other unrelated sites was the final straw along with how badly they slow things down, waste my battery, and waste my limited mobile data. I resisted blocking ads for as long as possible despite how much I loathe them - until either late last year or early this year.
On sites that allow it (Ars, Wiki), I pay for the content. I'm probably just a heartless bastard but I really don't care when I read complaints about ad blockers. They're the ones filling sites with crap.Īgreed.
It's also not like the ad networks and the sites that use them are victims here.