Adblocking is a security necessity.
The FBI has recommended the use of adblockers as well. Do your family a favor and install UBO on their devices.
Majority of Americans now use ad blockers
31–40 of 72 posts
Re: Majority of Americans now use ad blockers
#32"Personalized" advertising is just plain dumb --- and it is only a matter of time before advertisers are forced to reach the same obvious conclusion as consumers.
I agree, but I've been waiting for this moment to arrive for over a decade...
Re: Majority of Americans now use ad blockers
#33The original report: https://www.ghostery.com/blog/privacy-report-advertisers-and... . Curiously, only "76% of experienced cybersecurity professionals and 72% of programmers also reported using an adblocker, compared to just 52% of Americans."
I was once a security engineer at Google. So many people really believed ad blocking is like, actual theft. Got into an argument about that with my manager once lol.
Re: Majority of Americans now use ad blockers
#34> Feel free to add us [The Register] to your white list if you do use an ad blocker. We have full-time ops staff whose job it is around the clock to keep our sites clean of anything naughty.
Nah, I think I'll keep it on.
Re: Majority of Americans now use ad blockers
#35"Personalized" advertising is just plain dumb --- and it is only a matter of time before advertisers are forced to reach the same obvious conclusion as consumers.
I agree, but I've been waiting for this moment to arrive for over a decade...
It's coming. Progress is being made. A decade ago, the majority of Americans weren't using ad blockers.
Re: Majority of Americans now use ad blockers
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, but I've been waiting for this moment to arrive for over a decade...
It's coming. Progress is being made. A decade ago, the majority of Americans weren't using ad blockers.
This is true, but I predicted we'd get to 50% much faster than we did.
Re: Majority of Americans now use ad blockers
#37The original report: https://www.ghostery.com/blog/privacy-report-advertisers-and... . Curiously, only "76% of experienced cybersecurity professionals and 72% of programmers also reported using an adblocker, compared to just 52% of Americans."
I don't use an ad blocker at work because I have had it affect my work and lose time trying to figure out why something isn't working right.
If you’re a developer that’s very important information, since if you deploy an app that breaks with ad blockers, it’s not going to work for 52% of users.
Re: Majority of Americans now use ad blockers
#38This plus the third-party cookie apocalypse means advertisers are going to need to seriously reconsider the entire approach of personalization and targeting. For all of the billions and billions of dollars poured into ad-tech, I really don't buy that this stuff is any more effective than manually chosen or page contextual display ads. Maybe for juicing a few short term points on an A/B test, sure. But has anyone seri…
I suspect it’s very valuable for a small proportion of campaigns that very carefully use its features and are thoughtfully designed, and the same or worse than traditional advertising for the rest. I further suspect a whole lot of the ones it’s very-good for are scams, or scam-adjacent.
Even for those campaigns it might be cheaper to cast a wider net using a non-personalised ad scheme.
Re: Majority of Americans now use ad blockers
#39"use" is a funny word here, because the experience of using an ad blocker is very passive. It's not like you need to click a button to enable ad blocking on each page. Once you install the extension, it just happens. I wager a lot of adblock users are non-technical people who don't even know they're using adblocking, but just had it installed by the local techie in their life to make both their lives easier.
Sure, but then again, most users are your mom and your uncle. Replace with "have an ad-blocker on their browser" if you wish; or "on their computer", as they would probably say. Tell you more: most won't even know the difference between an ad-blocker and an anti ad-tracker, but this is exactly the battle that publishers and advertisers are losing: half the US Internet users are now "not reachable" by their ads.
Sounds like advertisement is something that people usually don't want to see or click on. I wonder why?
Re: Majority of Americans now use ad blockers
#40The original report: https://www.ghostery.com/blog/privacy-report-advertisers-and... . Curiously, only "76% of experienced cybersecurity professionals and 72% of programmers also reported using an adblocker, compared to just 52% of Americans."
I was once a security engineer at Google. So many people really believed ad blocking is like, actual theft. Got into an argument about that with my manager once lol.
> So many people really believed ad blocking is like, actual theft.
If copyright infringement is considered theft, then AdBlock would've to be considered akin to theft too. They're inherently the same thing. You're consuming the content without providing the expected revenue to the owner.
From my perspective, neither can be considered theft. Which is why I use AdBlock, too. But if either is theft, then the other would've to be too.
You could very well argue that AdBlock is technically worse then copyright infringement, because you're still using the bandwidth of the provider. With "piracy" you're sharing the content through other avenues.