Poll of the Day > How much would it cost to keep you from using ad blockers?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I'll need $20 million at least.

In all seriousness though I haven't seen an ad on the internet in over 20 years and I plan to keep it that way.

I'd like to think there's a number and then every once and a while I get a dose of totally unfiltered internet and I am literally shocked at how terrible the internet has become. I thought it was just stuff like Google being worse and Twitter being garbage but it goes far beyond that.

SomeUsername529 posted...

I'd like to think there's a number and then every once and a while I get a dose of totally unfiltered internet and I am literally shocked at how terrible the internet has become. I thought it was just stuff like Google being worse and Twitter being garbage but it goes far beyond that.

Pretty much this. I get that ads are essential to support the content I keep consuming, but holy tinglebadgers it's miserable to try browsing without a blocker, and so many ad services (because it's so commonly outsourced and not curated by the site itself) don't do nearly enough to ensure the ads are even safe for computers. In the case of most bigger sites, I'm fairly certain they're just deliberately making the problem as bad as they can for the sake of selling a solution to it, and I'm quite happy to tell those ads where to go.

That said, of the numbers presented, $200k+ would improve my quality of life to enough of an extent that I probably would agree to stop blocking ads if somebody were actually to offer it to me, as tempting as it is to insist that there's no way I'd ever tolerate it.

I'd rather we come up with some group funding solution, but that could be hard?

Per capita, ~$1000 is spent on ads per person a year.

Go back to simple banner ads and I will gladly disable ad block. Otherwise, I consider ad companies terrorist organizations and I don't negotiate with terrorists.

Side note, I have a tab open to travel.state.gov because I am renewing my passport. How the HELL is that the site that uBlock needs to block over 3,000 ads on?

After looking at the poll numbers I settled on $20k per year.

Ads are a vector for malware. I am protecting myself by using an ad blocker and have done so since 2006.

forever? at least 20 million, then i just wouldn't use the internet anymore outside of maybe streaming services because advertisements have already become worse than actual aids at this point.

Ads never really bothered me, only reason why I even bothered downloading an ad blocker was because rom site ads gives computer aids(or at least they used to)

those full page ads can also go to hell as well but those were always fairly rare.

$20k would be sufficient

Millions. Enough for me to retire early and never worry about bills, future medical expenses, etc.

Nothing short of that would alter my life enough to offset the pain of website ads.

I don't think 20 million USD is enough to stop using the internet completely. Without adblock I would not have the forbearance to look at a web page.

I'd do it for 2 mil. That's enough for me to pay off my debt, buy a house/car and live off the rest as investment interest.

It's a hard question to answer for me. I don't really use adblockers overmuch (though I do use script blocking, which blocks all of GameFAQs' ads - and fuck 'em).

I don't mind watching a 15 second commercial (or one that's skippable after 5 seconds) that much. Especially if I know that at least to some degree it's helping support creators I enjoy. I generally just see it as the price that needs to be paid, because nothing in life is ever truly free. Basically, I grew up in the 80s and 90s, where the only media was TV - it's sort of ingrained in my brain that commercials need to exist because otherwise all content goes premium and you'll only see what you're willing to directly pay for.

But I do have a line. A line where convenience and gratitude ends and where bullshit and annoyance begins. YouTube upping from one commercial at a time to two edged closer to that line. Going from one ad per video to occasionally seeing a dozen fucking ads over the span of a half-hour video pushes much closer to that line. YouTube fucking with how content creators can control where/when ads appear in a video (seriously fucking over ASMR creators and similar who don't want ads at the end) pushes closer to that line. YouTube still running ads on channels that are "demonetized" (which just means YouTube keeps all the ad money and refuses to pay the creators at all) pushes towards that line. And so on.

Eventually, YouTube will reach a point where they push father than I'm willing to go, and that's the day when I accept the inconvenience of finding an effective adblocker and keeping it up to date as much as possible, and never watch another ad on their service again.

They are currently relying on my goodwill and apathy to continue watching ads - so it's a very bad idea for them to keep doing things that deplete my goodwill and give me motivation to overcome that apathy. When using the service the way they want me to becomes more inconvenient to me than simply looking for alternatives, I'm going to have zero loyalty to Google's bloated tumor of a platform. And once I start, I'm never going to stop. I've never going to give them the benefit of the doubt and "go back" - at that point my apathy and inertia will keep me using the adblocker forever.

If the current adblocker BS winds up spiraling too far out of control, and YouTube keeps getting more aggressive, it's more likely to drive me to go looking for an alternative, not less.

I stopped allowing GameFAQs ads through because they kept upping the ante on intrusive and even outright malicious ads. And once you reach that point, you no longer deserve a single cent of active revenue from me, and I will go out of my way to insure you get nothing (unfortunately, they're still benefiting indirectly from my site traffic alone, because my activity here adds to the stats that they show advertisers for number of active users and time spent on site when haggling over ad costs).

And I don't consider YouTube Premium a viable answer, because I don't believe you should be rewarded for creating a problem and then "solving" it. For the same reason why I won't pay for microtransactions in games that have been made extra grind-heavy solely to justify XP boosters, I'm not paying YouTube to avoid ads because they've gone out of their way to make ads as annoying as possible.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

I don't think 20 million USD is enough to stop using the internet completely. Without adblock I would not have the forbearance to look at a web page.

NoScript isn't an adblocker, but it technically blocks a lot of ads. It might be an effective compromise for you.

Though if the mythical genie offering us this deal says NoScript counts as an adblocker so we can't use that either, I'd tell him to shove his bottle up his ass. The Internet is pretty much unusable without NoScript because there's so goddamned much malicious code out there. Even on otherwise completely innocuous websites.

> How much would it cost to keep you from using ad blockers?

They'd have to pay ME, they're costing my time - not the other way around

The number of times I've tried to load a website, checked NoScript because it failed, and found that it was trying got load 20+ different domains is really quite alarming. Even here, on a relatively barebones site, it's trying to load 7 different domains, with zero loss of function from my end for only having two of them enabled (gamespot.com and fandom.com, and I could probably kill fandom without issue). And that's with uBlock stamping out the actual ads, so I imagine it'd get significantly worse if they were trying to get through NoScript as well.

adjl posted...

The number of times I've tried to load a website, checked NoScript because it failed, and found that it was trying got load 20+ different domains is really quite alarming. Even here, on a relatively barebones site, it's trying to load 7 different domains, with zero loss of function from my end for only having two of them enabled (gamespot.com and fandom.com, and I could probably kill fandom without issue). And that's with uBlock stamping out the actual ads, so I imagine it'd get significantly worse if they were trying to get through NoScript as well.

What pisses me off is how many sites are including Google code as critical necessity.

I'd like to cut Google out of my life as much as possible (I even refuse to use Chromium-based browsers because I don't trust them), but blocking Google or Google Static or Googleapis on certain sites disables functionality. So you have to wind up allowing them if you want to use that site.

The Internet of today is a terrible place compared to 20+ years ago.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

NoScript isn't an adblocker, but it technically blocks a lot of ads. It might be an effective compromise for you.

If that's the case I use part of the 20 million to fund development a new program called adbrick.

Yep. I tend to enable those on a temporary basis only if the site won't work without them, since they show up everywhere with varying degrees of necessity and if I can avoid loading them, I'd prefer to.

adjl posted...

The number of times I've tried to load a website, checked NoScript because it failed, and found that it was trying got load 20+ different domains is really quite alarming. Even here, on a relatively barebones site, it's trying to load 7 different domains, with zero loss of function from my end for only having two of them enabled (gamespot.com and fandom.com, and I could probably kill fandom without issue). And that's with uBlock stamping out the actual ads, so I imagine it'd get significantly worse if they were trying to get through NoScript as well.

ya, I find fextralife almost impossible to use cuz of that.

NoScript will say something like only 3 scripts are blocked, so I'll allow fextralife.... and then suddenly there's like 30 scripts being blocked

Lokarin posted...

ya, I find fextralife almost impossible to use cuz of that.

NoScript will say something like only 3 scripts are blocked, so I'll allow fextralife.... and then suddenly there's like 30 scripts being blocked

Yep, that's always fun. I think I've managed to get a couple fextralife wikis working with far more experimentation than is reasonable (a testament to how enjoyable Dark Souls is that I'm willing to do that, I guess >.>), but the explosion of new domains when you let one through is crazy.

20 million? That'll do it.