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Adblockers stop publishers serving ads to (or even seeing) 1bn web users - Press Gazette
(pressgazette.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
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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.
Ads used to be static text in the sidebar that the site owner manually put there. They didn't have any tracking and didn't slow down the loading time. Once they started adding images, I started using an ad blocker. I was stuck on dial-up until 2008 and a single, small image could add 10 or more seconds to the page loading time.
2008! Bro I feel for you, retrospectively.
I was even okay with images. It’s when the images started moving, making it difficult and distracting to read text that I realized if they are willing to sacrifice the core purpose of the page for ads, it’s only going to get worse.
Remember the target that would move back and forth really quickly to try to get you to click it?