“Here’s the thing: I am 100% sure these things are connected. The more people block ads, the more aggressive advertising became.”

This is naive at best. Some of the worst ads (popups/popunders/autoplay flash with sound) existed years before adblockers.

I don’t know what the adblocker usage rate is but I’d bet it’s low as virtually none of the non-technical people I know use them.

This sort of implicitly assumes that ad blockers are particularly common. Most normies I know aren’t using one, and are surprised by how pleasant and functional the web is when they’re at my pi-hole protected apartment. Anecdata, obviously, but am I wrong in my assessment?

Ah, the old "if you stopped saying no there would be no rape" argument

Ad blocking proliferates, yet Google continues to make more ad revenue than they did the year before. How does that happen?

It happens by improving margins by paying site owners less per ad than they did before. This resulted in mass-produced blogspam that site owners could jam more ads into to make up the loss in revenue. Google rewards these types of pages by upranking them in their search algorithm, then extinguishing them by summarizing the content in the search result ("zero-click searches"), thereby paying site owners nothing while profiting off the ads in the search result page.

This would have happened regardless of ad blocking, where they were already paying nothing to site owners due to zero impressions and clicks. Google is a publicly traded company, so the line needs to go up every quarter by any means necessary.

And O2 helped to kill the nicotine cigar business. And the electric car helped to kill the fossil fuel industry.

Do people read what they post?

Ad blockers are a rational response to bad incentives and blaming them is like blaming progress for displacing harmful industries.

Windows has ads now despite me buying it. Peoples TVs have ads now despite paying for them. Ads are now in our fridges for god sake. The idea that if these companies had just made enough money they would have left us alone is farcical.

Block ads always.

The engagement-mining "content" is what killed the open web. Adblockers are just disposing of the body.

The genuinely useful stuff out there is on 1990's era personal sites. Then there are Wikipedia. Then there are company blogs (most of these were slop even before LLMs, but there are some quite good ones). Then user-generated hobbyist-driven stuff where advertisement only paid for running the platform - and these could be crowdsourced, it's not like running a server is that expensive. The rest is the content created for the sole purpose of showing people ads - and it belongs in the wastebasket.

Ironically the link won’t load. But I’m sure it would’ve been a waste of my time, just like all the ads I’m forced to watch.