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by hechang1997 2417 days ago
Many many people use adblockers now. The amount of users they will alienate would be very high.
2 comments

Nope, mostly tech-savvy people use adblockers, it's astonishing how many people still see ads on a daily basis.
It is true and I wonder if the tech people aren't becoming the privileged class who knows ways of not feeding the big corporations.

For example, it takes a lot of effort and energy for me to explain to non-technical people that comparing Apple and Google in terms of their mobile devices is non-sense. Just look at their regular financial reports, I usually say, and understand that one is an online advertisement business, while the other is a purely software + device business. One wants you to use their devices at all costs, while the other wants you to buy them. Those are very different core business models, different mentality and approaches. Etc etc. And so the choice between them comes down not even to taste or quality or price; it comes down to which business model you sell your soul to.

And then there's ad blockers and understanding how modern internet works etc. It worries me that the disconnect between those who understand the inner workings of tech and those who don't becomes bigger and bigger by the day. As the tech business itself becomes more and more sophisticated (and monopolist/authoritarian).

According to stats I’ve seen, around 30% of people use ad blockers. And that’s growing. Nobody stops using an ad blocker.

It’s not just tech savvy people. I imagine plenty of people here have set one up for their family members.

I operate a website visited primarily by both unsophisticated users and non-expert but savvy users (the former group being the demographic that exchange emoji-laden meme images on Facebook, and the latter group as the type of people comfortable getting around a phpBB board in the mid-2000s). I've seen a steady decline in AdSense/AdWords ad-revenue from visitors based on ad-impressions despite increasing visitor counts from those two main demographics - the evidence suggests they're using some form of ad-blocker.
Makes sense for them to kill it now before the majority gets a taste of what it could be like.
But there will still be adblockers. Safari still has them, manifest v3 Chrome will too. They work great and the user doesn't need to hand over all of their browsing information to the adblocker for it to work.