How does ad-block work?

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I use adblocking and do not patronize websites that ask me to turn it off. Many people don’t realize that ads are extremely dangerous and can lead to your computer getting totally pwned. Ads are a really easy vector for all kinds of bad actors to add machines to their botnets and perform phishing operations.

I consider the current state of content monetization as akin to mob rule. The people running the adblockers are the mob bosses, and the people running ad networks as the unsuspecting rubes of even worse bad guys than the mob.

People wanting you to turn off your ad blockers are like those goody-two-shoes that naively want you to trade safety for a measure of moral forthrightness. Savvy operators just deal with the mob and do their best to keep their distance.

In order for Internet content to escape mob rule, civilization needs to get in there and build cities and political systems and police departments. If the ad networks can be cleansed of all the riff-raff, then it’ll start being safe to turn off the blockers.

But the big actors, AmaGooFaceSoft haven’t gotten around to really tackling the problem yet. Any time they try, their efforts get compromised and their solutions become vectors for malware.

The reality is that this stuff is really hard. Advertising only gets profitable with scale. As someone looking to buy ad inventory, it doesn’t make sense for me to independently verify every single ad channel I’m going to use, the amount of effort involved is too much just for a channel I’m going to spend $5–50/month on anyway. If I’m running a small website, I don’t want to do all the work of selling my ad space and vetting the buyers of that space myself.

Ad networks work for everybody in this space, except for the end viewers of the ads. Ad networks, by their very nature, give up part of the experience of using your website to a third party. End viewers want to see more vetting and attention around ensuring both malware producers and ads that significantly impact usability, such as intrusive popovers or animated click-catchers, don’t get run on their machines.

This is the sort of Wild West that practically begs for someone to come in and do the hard work of ensuring stability and order. The people that make ad blockers are not nice people. They’re out for themselves and are not above shady practices in order to make money. But like the mob, they have to remain connected to their community, their base of power. So ultimately they have to remain loyal to ordinary web users.

A real solution, cleaning up ad networks, makes them less lucrative. The advertising industry desperately wants to retain profitability. Internet advertising already has horrific margins. Spending a ton of time on R+D to develop better solutions has failed every time they tried it. So they have resorted to PR campaigns.

I’m not buying it. I have no moral compunctions to ensure that content creators make a profit. If all the news outfits and such go out of business, let smaller, hungrier, scrappier content outfits take their place. It’s sad, because there’s good content and important journalism being done. But it’s not worth my laptop getting hacked, and it’s not worth dealing with the constant ugliness of ads.