Companies who use ads incessantly need to understand that it is in their best interests that my ad blocker works flawlessly.
If I see an ad for their product, it guarantees that I will NOT be buying that product. No advertisements means the product will be considered if and when I decide I want to purchase a product of that type.
If manufacturers want their products to sell, all they have to do is two things.
Pi-Hole is great. I had an original RPi just collecting dust and I repurposed it as a Pi-Hole (I got a PoE to USB adapter and it just hangs off one of my switches). It works great - even on such long in the tooth hardware. Between ad-hoc blocking extensions and the Pi-Hole DNS, my internet browsing is a much nicer experience.
Are these some kind of weird artifact of something that otherwise makes sense? Because these completely mystify me.
I bought the Ancestry DNA thing. I am now in the group of people you should never advertise this to again. And yet…
It’s targeted advertising! Ads cost more but they are targeted, you see, at people who are known, based on user tracking, to be interested in the things being sold! Big data! Machine Learning! Marketing buzzwords!
In other words, it’s a demonstration of the complete uselessness and worthlessness of all that vaunted user surveillance. Having vampired all your privacy away and shadowed you around the internet like a creepy stalker, the best that Google and other ad sellers can do is serve up ads for stuff that you are no longer interested in buying.
Look advertisers of the world, I’ll stop blocking all your shit when you stop the surveillance capitalism. You go first.
But in the long run I don’t think advertising is a good way to make the internet work, I’m hoping that someone thinks of something better to replace the whole model. This is just a dead end.
I’m pretty happy with Ublock origin+EFF’s HTTPS Everywhere and Privacy Badger.
I feel funny talking about the proliferation of online ads here on the BoingBoing ad outlet.
And the constant dental implant ads I get on BoingBoing mobile.
There has been an explosion of dental implant ads. My god, I see them everywhere!
Someone hasn’t read Brecht’s Die Physiker, it seems.
They also have that astonisngly annoying red box that is animated, moves around, and jumps on top of the content as you scroll down…
Hear me, boingboing? Fuck that ad box, and Fuck you for serving it.
I’ve read BB for years and never seen that one, victory for the block list 
I love no-script. If need be, the host file can be handy too.
Not…really. I mean, they’re marked “From the Boing Boing Store” but look otherwise like normal posts. I suppose you could argue that that implies they’re third-party ads, but they’re clearly doing their best to pretend to be native content while shilling for fucking aromatherapy healing.
This is an interesting point.
My Pi-hole blocks an average of at least 50% of requests at the moment (and I’ve seen it as high as 75%). Current client-side ad tech means that all those requests are being made by web browsers. If this was replaced by server-side systems then those requests would by definition be made by the web host. Would sites be willing to pay for the extra bandwidth I wonder? How do Akamai charges compare to ad revenue? 
Server-side might mean rather less possibility of black hat and cross-site badness too perhaps, since the security model would all be centralised at the host and not delegated to up-to-date browsers with non-rogue plugins.
Interesting…
I don’t begrudge anyone researching questions like this, but for lay persons (heh), ideally, the only question would be “am I going to voluntarily use services that require technology so advanced it has yet to be invented in order to make the experience bearable?”
With luck this will result in an arms race the end state of which is advertisements that are imperceptible to humans.
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