They call it “dark traffic” - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.
Not surprised that its growing. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and its only getting worse, and will continue to get worse every month.
The trade body called it “illegal circumvention technology”
Lol. Fuck off.
I used the internet for a long time before ad blockers even existed. Everybody simply ignored ads, instead. But that wasn’t good enough for the advertisers. They weren’t happy unless we were forced to look at the ads. Extraordinarily obtrusive ads. Popup ads. Popunder ads. That’s when people started blocking ads. When you realized that your browser always ended up with 20 extra advertising windows.
Nobody really cared about blocking ads until advertisers forced us to. They made the internet annoying to use, and sometimes impossible to use.
Advertisers couldn’t just be happy with people ignoring their ads, so they forced our hands and fucked themselves in the process. Now, we block them by default. I don’t even know any websites that have unobtrusive ads because I never see their ads in the first place.
Now, they want to go back to the time when we would see their ads but ignore them. Fuck off. We know we can’t even give them that much. If you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile.
What’s frustrating to me is the idea that law makers and advertisers believe I don’t have a right to alter data that comes onto things I own. And nobody chime in with the brain dead “☝️🤓 actually you don’t own it.” Because even if you wanna waste time with that stupid distraction, I own my computer. I built it from parts.
Controlling my perception is my right. If I wanna use things that block ads that’s my right. PERIOD. I NEED TO BLOCK ADS BECAUSE OF MY DISABILITY.
You have that right at least in Europe. The nuance is that website provinding content can choose to not serve it to you. Or something like that but maybe more complexe.
