You should totally get an ad-blocker
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Warning: this blarb is a long rant. If you want to read less heated content, you can read my blarb on my ad collection, but anyways, what I mean is:
You should totally get an ad-blocker.
Like, really. I believe everyone should get at least 1 method of blocking ads set up on any device they have, be it Pi-hole, AdGuard DNS, or uBlock Origin.
Let me explain:
Ads are becoming increasingly malware
By becoming malware, I mean they have become so intrusive and annoying it pushed me to start using an ad-blocker. Ads that auto-play music. Ads that appear on the middle of the website that I have to wait to dismiss. Even people nowadays are designing their website to have more ads than actual content.
The biggest offenders have to be the ads on mobile games (yes I play these things.) You have to wait like 15 seconds and click like 3 different buttons in order to dismiss them, and somewhere, someone in these ad companies thought it would be a good idea for ads to just open the App Store automatically. Needless to say I have AdGuard DNS set up to stop these ads from appearing in my phone and if I ever find any ads that sneak into my phone and does these kind of tricks I’m instantly uninstalling the app.
The ads that I can’t really block from my phone comes from YouTube which, to this day, still has this bad habit of inserting ads directly in the middle of a sentence when the person in the video is talking. Oh, and also the Reddit app. Ads can appear in the middle of the comment section now. Great.
I also can’t help but notice the trend of social media sites making ads more and more similar to regular posts that the only visual cue you can use to differentiate them is one single very faint word, which allows them to mislead people that ads are genuine posts while adding just enough to make them not get sued for doing it.
If you could handle all of that and still using the internet without an ad-blocker or found all of these don’t describe the ads that you saw, good for you. But wait, it actually gets worse:
Ads are becoming increasingly malware (this time literally)
I can’t really say anything about the experience of other people, but as the more “tech-savvy” person in the neighborhood I’ve encountered situations where people would come to me asking why their phones are having popups telling them that “your storage is full” or “your phone is infected with viruses” while failing to realize the “popups” are actually ads that at best make them install a barely-functioning phone cleaner app that consumes more storage than it can save, and at worst actually infect their phones with viruses. In fact, malvertising has become such a common practice that even the folks at the FB of I themselves felt the need to put up a PSA telling people to install ad-blockers on their browsers that let me know that ad moderation has gotten even worse nowadays.
I do not want to support behaviors like this, and over time I start to consider website popups that tell me to disable my ad-blockers just like Windows program installers that tell me to disable my anti-virus program’s real-time protection feature because it may “interfere with the installation process”: No sane person should do this, and if a website/installer really doesn’t work I’ll just find another one on the internet that does the same thing.
Yes, this will mean sites will not be able to earn money by showing ads to you, which can be used to cover costs needed to keep the website function. But, to respond to that, I’d say:
You should consider other means of support other than watching ads
If your website/app/YouTube content creator have another mean to support them, do it. Tip them, buy their merch, subscribe to their Patreon, anything but watch ads that might expose you to bad advertising practices or malware. If you don’t have money, try spreading their works or talking good about them on social media. Whatever you do will be a lot more supportive to them than watching and clicking a thousand ads.
It doesn’t have to be like this
I believe that the reason why people start blocking ads is not the act of advertising itself, but the fact that the online advertising space have gotten really bad in the recent years. They start behaving like malware with all these annoying behaviors, the intrusion of privacy with cross-site tracking, and the fact that they can actually give you malware and have little to no intention to moderate stuff like this. It does not have to be like this. If rewarded ads on mobile games only last 5 seconds like how Google ads on them used to be, I won’t feel the need to block them on my phone.
So that’s it, rant over, and please, get an ad-blocker.