Study claims more than half of Americans use ad blockers
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Does anyone actually believe this garbage?
I don’t think that that is true in any so-called developed world nation. Think of your friends; how many know what an ad-blocker is? Who don’t use the browser that came installed on the pc/phone?
Once I had to use the internet without and ad blocker ( shiver ). It was horrible. I still have nightmares.
Joking aside. I couldn’t believe how crammed full and chaotic sites were without an ad blocker. I have no evidence to support this other than my experience but I think , for me , ad blockers are good for my mental health. Being constantly exposed to all those messages trying to exploit insecurities can’t be good for people.
Anyways ad blockers are the best.
This is a census so people probability answered they use ad blockers on the computer but they didn’t ask about mobile, I assume
Here’s where the report is.
i think adblock use on mobile may be far more limited since google chrome on mobile dosent allow to load extensions on mobile
Firefox allows for the full ublock origin on mobile.
Nice! It only took 25 years.
i always lol about people opposing ad blockers.
how can anybody see this as a bad thing? ad blocking is cybersecurity.
Some people only believe what they’re told by an authority, and some people only view massive corporations, politicians, and the church as legitimate authorities. So if a corporation tells them it’s bad, they’ll believe it’s bad.
I’m a bit worried about that other 24%. How expert are they if they don’t recognize the risk?
maybe they don’t enable js at all /s
jk, maybe they value fingerprinting over that? even tor browser doesn’t have one built in.
There’s some inherent risk in the ad blocker as well, though. If it’s an extension, you’re trusting that this thing you installed, that can read and modify every website you visit, isn’t going to do anything sneaky. Yes, maybe it’s open source, but every once in a while something sneaks into open source projects, too. It will get caught, but it could be after the damage is done.
I mean, I use an ad blocker. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to value security and not use one.
Open source adblockers reduce that risk significantly. Don’t trust closed source blockers.
But by that logic, absolutely everything other than standing still in a fethal position in a dark cave is a cyber security risk.
Are you using an extremely solid version of Linux? Wellllll, sometimes bad actors can push bad code to open source projects! It’s a risk!
I mean, it’s true. Network-connected devices are inherently a cyber security risk.
Even ones that are air-gapped and get their updates via USB are a risk
Yes, which is why that can’t be used as an argument against one specific tool.
The benefits massively outweigh the risks when it comes to open source ad blockers (lets be honest, we’re all talking about uBO), but limiting your attack surface is a very widely practiced concept in cubersecurity, and there’s no situation where it is totally without merit.
Not using a browser extension but loading JavaScript isn’t limiting your attack surface
To be fair, I bet some percentage of those that don’t use an ad blocker ARE using something like no script and just don’t need one as a result.
Surprised the rates of adblocking is so high! I thought it was a little more niche.
Also surprised that the article didn’t mention manifest v3 rolling out later this year to Chrimium-based browsers - which will effectively end adblocking in all browsers except Firefox.
Google isn’t stupid, they know that ad blocking undermines their business. And Google controls Chromium: the backbone of almost all browsers. So of course they’re going to engineer it to prevent ad blocking. It was only a matter of time.
I’m doubtful of this article claims. Majority of them use adblocker? I’m sure its inaccurate. Most of the people I have seen don’t even know about adblocker. So google doesn’t have to worry for a long time. This article seems like bootlicking Google.
lmao let’s all thank YouTube for spreading the word about adblockers, best adverisment ever
The problem with YouTube is that even if you manage to block ads, you find most of the videos are ads too.
SponsorBlock is essential now. I switched from iPad to an Android tablet largely so I could use YouTube ReVanced. And on Android TV there’s SmartTube Next.
I get that creators gotta eat, but I pay for YouTube Premium already. If they would stop accepting sponsorships from scam companies I might even stop blocking those.
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I wonder if the statistic includes mobile users, because mobile ad blockers are definitely less popular than browser addons on desktop.
note: this isn’t an invitation to tell me about all the wonderful mobile ad blocking solutions, I’m already aware of virtually all of them.
“Github for lesbians” sounds like something I could recommend to my friends of that persuasion though.
Added, for those of you who missed the reference: https://xkcd.com/624/
Good, your attention is a commodity, don’t let advertisers steal it. We’ve been assaulted with enough ads in public spaces already.
It is literally wasting the most valuable thing we have, our lifetime.
Humm… https://lemmy.world/post/13631763
SponsorBlock - for anyone interested in taking their ad blocking hobby to the next level.
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Can confirm. Been using with freetube, invidious and clipious as it’s built-in and it’s fantastic.
W
Data like this makes me wonder what Firefox is doing. If Nord can sell a VPN surely Mozilla could get some market share
I’m not convinced the VPNs actually make financial sense, I kinda wonder if there is someone funding them. They market so aggressively, and are priced so cheaply it doesnt quite make sense to me.
I used to work for PIA. The best users are the occasional user, and there’s a lot of them. They cost little bandwidth, they pop on every now and then and off fairly quickly. Andrew also got pretty lucky, riding both the Bitcoin and Snowden waves. It probably did ultimately run at a loss at some point, but all the big ones could ride on their crypto payments rapidly increasing in value, and the hardcore privacy people were very happy to pay in crypto.
You can easily cram ~1000-5000 active users on a 10 Gbps server because you can assume that most people are far from reaching gigabit on their own (OpenVPN limitations helped a lot there). Even at just a dollar a year per users you’ve still got 5 grands which more than pays for the server which really only needs a good NIC and a bunch of IPs. But remember, most of those are idle or not connected at all, so you can have many more users than there is bandwidth available. And at that scale you get bulk discounts on the servers as you fill up a good rack or two.
I have to imagine at this point the market is incredibly saturated though, I left a bit over 6 years ago.