[acdha]

That’s one option but it’s not what’s happening. Historically ads were easily blocked because they came from different domains; as we’re seeing now increased deployment of blockers has lead to things like CNAME cloaking or even first-party hosting. The amount of money at play is enough that they’re going to keep trying more invasive approaches as the old ones become less profitable.

The podcasts I mentioned aren’t running their own ad network, they’re using a service which injects audio segments into your download. I’d expect things like that to become more common as ad revenues decline, with an endgame something like CDNs inserting tailored content directly to avoid any other hostnames or paths which easy to block.

[yc12340]

> Historically ads were easily blocked

Historically ads were served by the site owner at their own discretion. Prior to that ads were served by TV and radio channels. None of those approaches were easy to block.

Dedicated ad networks on separate domains are relatively recent fad (since ~15 years ago). A lot websites still ship first-party ads, many have never stopped to.

[ajsnigrutin]

First party ads are also a part of many content creators (eg. "this video is sponsored by NordShadowraid Wallet"), and currently, the only way to block them is via crowdsourcing (eg. sponsorblock addon).