| Adblockers are a symptom of poor ethics on the part of web site owners and advertisers. Given how obnoxious a lot of ads can be and how various site owners deploy them, I'm of the opinion that advertisers should be demanding basic standards of conduct. Quickly. Or risk completely losing any credibility. Trust has to be re-established. Your web site's continued existence is not part of the journey towards re-establishing that trust. Don't bother: you and your industry have committed unethical behaviour. You don't get to quote declining earnings now. You've caused massive trust issues and your declining advertising revenues are just a symptom. Ever been to a download site and seen ads with big fake download buttons? Especially near the actual download link? That's unethical behaviour. Its also why I feel completely at ease if I simply block all ads from that page in the name of basic security. Nothing anyone can say would convince me to re-enable ads on that page. I am allowed to know which button is real. Simple as that. Its a real shame the site owner tolerates such ads. Their unethical behaviour means I must now defend against a deliberate attack. They could easily not put fake download links on there. But they didn't. Do you see the problem now? Advertisements are now associated with bad and/or deceptive behaviour. What does all this mean? Simply put, I can now justifiably treat ads on websites with a basic level of suspicion. They are privacy nightmares and cannot be trusted to be benign. They aren't just "show this ad to eyeballs for awareness and generate leads for sales". They are now actively designed with fingerprinting, targeting, logging, tracking, identification. Some of them have defences to reestablish tracking in the face of adblocking such that fingerprinting involves more than cookies or other straightforward means. They are intended to follow site visitors around the internet like some creepy stalker. The extent to which this tracking goes simply demonstrates how desperate the need is to associate, track and identify every little aspect. This is the opposite of benign. I'm now at the stage of almost considering ads as a form of malware. That is how bad the advertising companies have let things go. This is advertisers fault. Don't complain about losing revenue when even one straightforward example is so pointlessly deceptive to be indefensible. There are plenty of other examples I'm sure. It's a pity you can't just put ads on websites. But, no, you have to make it as creepy as possible. The distance between creepy and criminal isn't that far. People are noticing and they don't like what they find. You think it's bad now but wait until it really takes off. Adblocking may well become the least of your worries. |