It would be interesting to see what happened to their numbers. I imagine they alienated a lot of users by doing that and had to stop.
At my company we have an initiative to roll an ad-blocker out to about 2,500 desktops just to prevent the clean-up costs and improve user experience while using our own white lists. Given our industry, we just can't risk it even with threat management firewalls, OpenDNS Umbrella, and some well-engineered multi-layer security going on.
The disappointing thing for me is that I appreciate well-placed and curated ads. I white list some sites to support them, etc.
It's the websites the remind me of the sort of silliness in the movie Idiocracy [1] are impossible to use, not to mention trust with your computer.
[1] https://filmdump.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/idiocracy-1.jpe...