| I mostly agree with you. I don't think adblocking is great. However I think for several reasons it won't be as bad as you think. The vast majority of users use software on default settings and never change anything. IIRC only like 30% of users bother to install adblocking, and while that increases, it's going to asymptote sooner or later. For the time being ad blocking is still inconvenient on many platforms like mobile and smart TVs. I still see lots of ads whenever I use any platform other than my desktop. And fewer users use desktop. As technology improves, the costs of running websites should decrease. This means bandwidth, storage, open source software for running the website, etc. Many websites that required ad revenue to operate in the past, could get by with much less today or in the future. I know that's not ideal. But most of the software I use is produced open source without profit motive. Why can't the same be true for software that runs websites? Sites like HN and reddit get 99.99% of their content from unpaid users. Reddit uses entirely volunteer moderators even. In the past newspapers and magazines required subscriptions. The worst case is we go back to that world. I can watch tons of TV ad free with a very cheap subscription to netflix, and youtube is rolling out a similar platform now. As much as I hate paywalls, they seem less sinister than advertising based models. Adblocking will never be complete. You can block banner ads, but you are never going to be able to block someone endorsing a product in their podcast or youtube video (ok I shouldn't say never, but it seems reasonably unlikely for the near future.) Those ads also seem the least sinister and annoying to me, so I am ok with that. Websites might just put up endorsements or self serve ads, instead of relying on ad servers. |
The day firefox will stop relying on google's advertising money maybe it will feature a fully loaded ad block such as ublock origin by default and the situation will be much different. Up until now mozilla has not delivered on the putting the user first marketing gimmick.
Hopefully at some point in a not so distant future most browser will get out of the pandora's box and block ads and tracking out of the box.
Obviously, chrome will not come with a fully loaded adblock as google makes its huge piles of monies from being the biggest ad network.