The problem are not ads. The problem is the huge amount of ads, bigger bigger bigger, animated, with sound, tracking and and and...
Nobody has a problem with small decent ads without tracking, but that was not enough for big companies.
Even subtitle ads break your focus from the content, give bad incentives, unfair leverage, etc.
If ads were not here, most junk content in the internet would not exist because people would not pay 20 cents to see it. They pay to see it with ads, because it's a price they don't pay consciously, nor can they assess the consequences clearly.
I'm for the total and complete ban of ads. A content can't exist without it? Ask people to pay. If they don't, it means it didn't have real value. Let it die.
Worse, ads create a huge asymmetry of power in the favor of those who already have it. If you can throw a lot of money to ads, you can gain on the competition. Local small shops can't do that, so ads promotes way more coca cola than organic carrots.
Besides, the people publishing ads have an agenda that almost never align with the customers interest. People say there are ads they want to see, but the reality is that even those ads are not trying to make you more knowledgeable. They try to sell you something.
We have thousands of communities of experts in stuff, testers, consumers, bloggers, than can inform you. You don't need ads to know about something.
Society as a whole would be better without it.
Newspaper would be more objective, streets would be more beautiful, content would be more qualitative.
What about all those youtubers that couldn't exist without ads ?
99.99999% of them are crap. The youtube frontpage is a trash can.
A minority is good, but in the new adsless society, some of them would survive in a different way. Some would not, but the benefits are more important. Just like the US didn't keep thralls because "think of the economy".
Finally, the ads lead to websites to promote engagement at all cost, which fuels fake news, outrages, and tribalism on social medias. Ads are a burden to the human species.
And I say that... as a person who gets a lot of revenue from ads.
I do. When I want to see products, I'll explicitly ask for them. Nobody is allowed to grab my attention unsolicited. I have attention deficit, it's hard enough to focus as it is and I really don't need entitled company thinking it's okay to just hijack it at their convenience. I really couldn't care less about their "legitimate business interests" or whatever.
When email users do it, we call it spam. When applications do it, we call it focus stealing. Advertising is just yet another form of abuse that should not be tolerated under any circumstances. If they won't stop, we'll make technology that will make them stop. We don't need to apologize for it or try to reach a compromise with them. Their business model is unacceptable, period.
You usually have to wait for the trackers, ads, popups, accept-popups,newsletters signups etc. I basically cant view 60% of the webpages google recommends for me ony android mobile. The other 40% is usually just super thin seo content :/
I just finished reading the Gemini Protocol specs. I really hope something like this takes off and there will be a second 'silo/community' running alongside the modern web.
I don't use uBO just for ads, I have tons of custom cosmetic filters to block all the god damn always-on-top video players, popups, fullscreen fade outs, annoying sidebars, non-ad animations, fonts, etc.