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Saturday, July 23rd 2022 - On Ads and Adblockers
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I had an interesting conversation on one of my boards
this morning. There was a discussion involving the
merit of ad-supported Internet services and websites and
the common circumventing of those ads by adblockers.
Their argument was simple, and upon initial criticism,
admittedly somewhat sound. They postulated that it is
widely known that revenue on the Internet is backed by
ad-driven content, and that blocking those
advertisements was akin to piracy.
When I first encountered this argument, it sounded pretty
solid, even if it did stand opposed to my admitted practice
of using adblockers (my wife even wants my to turn our raspi
into a pihole). But as I poked at it, I began to realize
this:
I never agreed to provide my time or computing resources to
corporations for ads. Every ad that comes up eats a bit of CPU,
a bit of RAM and a bit of my viewing time. How is this not
theft? This isn't passive viewing like an advertisement on
a television station - these ads can cause nontrivial resource
depletion.
In fact the #1 reason people started employing adblockers was
because they were tired of ads piling up on their browsers
crashing them.
No, corporations need to find a better way to monetize the
web. A way that doesn't rely on me providing my resources for
them to make my day inconvenient. Nobody should have to pay
for someone to advertise to them, and that's precisely what
the current paradigm requires.
