It's getting to a point where you need to actively monitor every network request the site makes. It's despicable and I have nothing but ill will for the data scientists, software engineers, and product managers who participate in this.
They had this huge background ad covering my whole screen with a bit of conent in the middle (which also has inlined ads of course). They served the background image from the root of their main domain, new url was generated with each request (there seemed to be no pattern that I could match), scripts requesting and displaying the ad were inlined, and the ad itself couldn't be easily hidden as it was attached directly to the <body> somehow. I played with blocking it for a few minutes and then just gave up and used different website.
They went back to regular ads after the election, but I know they are saving this crap for later. Oh, and they also do pop-up asking you to disable the ad blocker.
Ad supported content provides a wealth of information for people who otherwise wouldn't have access to it.
How do other businesses do it? By providing goods and services the customer wants at a fair price. Radical I know, it’s only worked for like, thousands of years...
Ads provide wealth redistribution. Resources are given to poor people subsidized by rich people.
Don’t kid yourself. If the major platforms could exclude those who aren’t in their advertisers demographics they wouldn’t waste a single server on them.
I'm old enough to remember a service, which added a footer into your IE5 and showed ads constantly, and in exchange, you got paid, with actual money. (Pocket money level, of course; unfortunately I can't recall service names, this was pre-2000.)
Getting a service for viewing ads - that is fine.
Telling me it's free then showing me ads - that's just plain dishonestly and/or lying, so don't tell me not to block ads: I never agreed to them explicitly.
And as for information access: Wikipedia, one of the most well known source of information, is running on donations - subscriptions, really. It is viable. Makes no money for investors though and serves and actual purpose, like a library.
I’m sure quite a number of people got nice bonuses and promos for bringing some of that revenue back.
There are other ways for advertisers to sneak into my world, but this kind of online advertisement is not one of them.
While I personally avoid FB and use DDG, most folks can't or aren't allowed to (no extensions).