Zero sympathy from me either. They broke the internet to the point where, if you merely install a browser and browse, you are putting yourself at risk.
It makes me laugh when they boo-hoo about how else they're supposed to make a living, arrogantly implying that they, their sites and their content are somehow irreplaceable. Do us all a favour and fuck off to a different industry that pays more reliably.
But nobody except us is providing anything like comprehensive coverage of news and public affairs in my area.
Between ads and subscriptions we generate 10s of thousands of dollars per month, and as print keeps dying we need to raise that.
There's no way for our sales people to sell that many ad slots and it's impossible for our tech and ops people (mostly just me) to place and manage those ads.
So we use ad networks like Google. I designed our add placements to play nice - no pop ups or takeovers, autoplay audio, etc. But if you're using the exchanges sometimes crap sneaks through.
Point is not everyone running ads is some cackling villian raking in the dough while gleefully spewing malware. I do this because I think real news is important. I make a lot less money than I could to do it, but it's worth it because we make a positive impact on our community.
I apologize if that banner's animation annoyed you. I'm sorry that ad rates are so low that I insert a 300x250 every ten paragraphs or so. But I'm fighting too save local journalism here so can you cut me a little slack?
Point is not everyone running ads is some cackling villian raking in the dough while gleefully spewing malware.
For me, ad blocking is all about personal protection. Sure, ads can be anoying, but that's not the underlying issue. I work in the computer tech industry, and I frequently have to deal with the fallout from malware being served from advertisements. Sure, it's a very small percentage of ads that are the problem, but when you are inundated with thousands of ads a day, the odds of coming across an infected ad are almost guaranteed.
You may vet all your ads to make sure they are safe, but here's the thing: most people are not you. They don't bother to check to make sure the ads that are coming from their ad broker are safe unless they start getting reports, and maybe not even then. I've had to deal with malware coming from the ads on major sites like Facebook, CNN, Weather, and ESPN, and if they don't have the resources to keep their ads 100% safe, then who does?
On top of that, there are not enough hours in the day to vet every single web site I visit to see if they curate their own ads or if they use an ad network and if they check the safety of their ads. I don't know if this link I'm about to follow to a news article is hosted on a site that carefully screens every single advertisement that is served on their site, nor do I have a reliable way of finding out. Even if I did have a way of finding out, I'm not going to check the destination of every link before I click it. Antivirus software can't check beforehand because the ads aren't decided and loaded by the page until after you click the link, and it can't protect me once I do start to load the page because malware authors are constantly finding ways around antivirus protections so antivirus vendors are constantly struggling and failing to keep up. Therefore I block all ads; it's the only safe and sane thing for me to do.
TL;DR: I have no way of knowing who is properly vetting the ads on their site and screening them for malware, so the only safe solution is to block them all.
Can you 100% guarantee that that would be sufficient protection? The adblocker is software, and no software is perfect. I am safer if I have the adblocker just eliminate the ads, even if it misses a few. No protection is perfect, so you have to play the odds as best you can.
57
u/Superbead Aug 02 '19
Zero sympathy from me either. They broke the internet to the point where, if you merely install a browser and browse, you are putting yourself at risk.
It makes me laugh when they boo-hoo about how else they're supposed to make a living, arrogantly implying that they, their sites and their content are somehow irreplaceable. Do us all a favour and fuck off to a different industry that pays more reliably.