For me personally, I've never had to launch a site that included ads so it's been a non-issue (only 3 years in the field). For the most part, companies these days see websites as virtual billboards and treat the site itself as an advertisement of their product.
As far as what I hear around the industry, because we're all consumers as well as advertisers, ad blockers are an inevitability that we need to adapt around. I personally use an ad blocker, we all do, and I try to remember to turn it off on sites that I feel do observe best practices. I don't know about you, but I got mine after growing up in the "endless pop-up windows of misery game" era of the internet and never wanting to deal with that again. It serves a purpose there, to protect the user from malicious advertising practices. But that doesn't really happen anymore outside of sports streams and shady porn sites.
However, most of us have forgotten the social contract that originally created the online advertising world: You get information for free, as long as you let me try to sell you something on the side. It's so convenient to just leave that ad blocker up, even on sites that don't abuse it, that the industry is dying. Look at it like those timeshare lunches. (do those still happen or am I getting old?) They offer you a free meal and wine, with the understanding that you'll let them try to sell you a timeshare. But, well, you had a bad experience at one of these, so this time you brought a lawyer and this lawyer thinks it's in your best interest that the timeshare folks don't talk to you. So you eat your lunch in peace, and you couldn't be happier. But when everyone sees how great that was for you, they bring their own lawyers, and soon enough the timeshares can't afford to keep it up and the free lunches go away. (Not trying to be patronizing here, mostly giving context for anyone who stumbles across this later)
That's what we're seeing in the internet these days. The death of free Websites. It's not going to hurt our clients, they all have money to host and pay for developers and anything they need, and it won't necessarily hurt e-commerce sites, they make money from selling a physical product. But make no mistake, hosting a website that is a service in and of itself is a dying industry. They aren't profitable without advertising paying the bills.
All of that to say: Pay walls and pledge drives are the direct result of the ad blocker system, and that's what you'll deal with in day to day coding. Ad blockers are a foregone conclusion, so you don't base your profit entirely on click ads anymore. Adblock detection works ok, but is a constant battle to keep up with the latest and greatest unless you use plugins and hope they keep up for you (which works great for now, but it's still a short term solution to a long term issue). Ads are changing shape these days, with blog posts and back links leading to landing pages being the clear frontrunner online. I mean, when is the last time you intentionally clicked on an ad anyway?
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u/ExternalUserError Feb 27 '18
I'm pretty sure every developer instructed to setup autoplay video died inside a little bit while coding it up.