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Comment by gurrone | Hacker News Reader

I find it amazing how often ad blocking is discussed here, and start to wonder how many peeps hanging out here on the other hand depend indirectly on ad revenue to pay bills? There are obviously the big corps Facebook and Google, but also my own small employer, which is in theory in a different biz, runs ads on the web shop as an additional income source (which I find not very clever, increases page load times and is simply not our core biz). Do we all pay our bills with money made from the pour souls who did not get around to install an ad blocker or advanced setups like a pi hole? I'm on the pro ad blocking camp personally, also worked in the past in a biz that was 100% ad financed for a short period of time. Also there the whole tech department was using ad blockers.

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As always, it's not the ads most of us object to- it's the trackers. Google's original idea for monetizing the web, that you would be interested in something related to what you were searching for, apparently failed and now everybody's trying to follow you around to see what you might be interested in purchasing.

It needs to stop.

I know it's a lame solution but I use ff and containers and have a "shopping" container for sites that I don't block trackers on. I also have various other containers for other sites I don't mind knowing about each other. But mostly I block them.

>it's not the ads most of us object to

I would love to see real data on this! Most of my peers don't want to be marketed to, at least when it comes to internet advertising. Definitely when it comes to traditional advertising (ie billboards are an eyesore, TV ads are offensive or irrelevant or just plain annoying).

Depending on how old you are, it used to be the norm in magazines and newspapers. You have an educational product so you buy an ad on the educational feature, for example.

I understand that advertisers pay for the sites I use and I would turn off the ad-blocker if I was promised I wasn't being tracked. But we have no control over those decisions so we do what we can.

You'll be sad to learn that most of wealth is created by taking advantage of people. Most of us agree that advertising is annoying at best and most of us work for companies that make their money from it. Most of the people in this category are knowledgable (see: privileged) enough to stop receiving advertisements.

Learning how to do this is not "hard" per se, but if you haven't had your own computer growing up and been born into an environment that encourages learning, you aren't going to be able to do this.

I can definitely agree with that. You can always explicitly whitelist a site you would like to see ads on and thus support, like I do

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