The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

> Ghostery

These guys are complaining that users don't want to be tracked. I honestly can't take a single word in the entire article seriously.

Advertisers will adapt. What you have to accept is more annoying advertising coupled with increasingly error-prone code in both ad-blockers and ad-blocker-blockers. The only one that wins is Moloch; everyone else is worse off.

> What information one can get from someone's browsing history is awfully invasive.

Is it? Advertisers don't get some kind of toast on their phones saying "Joe, 34 from Topeka with a toaster fetish, has just visited your site!" along with pictures of Joe and said toasters. That's a strawman that the anti-tracking people love to hint at, but it doesn't actually work that way.

What actually happens is that advertisers target broad categories. They say, "show this ad to midwesterners who've visited sites about toasters", and that's what happens. There's no secret dossier just waiting to be sold to the highest bidder for purposes always left unspecified.

Yes, centralized trackers do end up learning a portion of your browsing history. But you don't have to accept third-party cookies. You can run with an ad blocker. And you can just reset your cookie[1] state every so often. You can do any of these things. You'll just pay for your paranoia with a shittier web.

[1] Yes, I know about non-cookie trackers. Advertisers stashing information where it's hard to clear are scum. It's up to web browsers to make it easy to flush all server-visible state.

    > Is there a reason more sites don't do self hosted ads?

Meanwhile, hosting your own ads entails finding advertisers, wooing them, developing a relationship with them, maintaining that relationship, negotiating a contract, settling that contract, building an ad-serving system somehow, automating it somehow, etc. And that's if you're even big enough to attract anyone or even warrant the work to begin with. And the second you try to generalize it (which is what ad networks do), then you're back on every adblocker's default blocklist.

The web was always built to be adaptable to the end user device. The user agent was intended to act as the decision maker how to render the markup. For many years, browsers even respected the default foreground and background colors and font choices (sadly not many respect X resources anymore). CSS was designed to include an end user defined style sheet to override tiny fonts and other things that made web pages hard to read.

Not viewing animated banners isn't at all different from changing your base font, or not loading javascript. Had we chosen to call it "disabling" instead of "blocking" it would have been much more clear that this is an action that the user is and should be empowered to take. I do recognize that we're stuck with the loaded word for now, I just feel it's important not to forget that. The public discourse is dominated by media people, and their perspective is important too, but not more so than the technical one.