
What's developers' general attitude towards ads? - taewookim
I&#x27;m a developer who happens to do a lot of marketing simultaneously. I&#x27;ve been in a lot of intense debates about adblockers and how they affect publishers as well as advertisers, but also the other side, the adblocker users.<p>I&#x27;ve been in several meeting where ad tech devs were proposing all kinds of solutions, like content blocking, &quot;encrypting&quot; ad delivery, etc etc.<p>But I realize I&#x27;m talking to a very tiny niche. I wanted to ask the general dev audience who actually make cool stuff that draws the audience.. and hence the &quot;traffic generators&quot;.<p>What&#x27;s your take on ads? Hate it? Don&#x27;t care for it? What about the people who act as middlemen (i.e. the ad networks)? What&#x27;s ur attitude towards them?
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noir_lord
I don't see adverts.

Given the privacy implications, the malware and general scuzziness of the
industry I just block everything.

There is an argument that none-intrusive same domain adverts are much less
harmful but they get caught in the crossfire as far as I'm concerned.

As for blocking people with adblockers installed I have _zero_ issue with
people doing that since I can see the logical position (why should we serve
content to you if you block our adverts) but 99% of the time the content I
want from you I can find elsewhere anyway so I'll just go there.

As for technical circumvention, that just invites an arms race and since I and
others like me control the end device it's a losing arms race, given the
flexibility of current adblockers lists I can block anything I don't want to
see even if the source gets creative (I even use the adblocker to block non-
advert parts of pages I don't care about - theguardian's "Comment is Free"
section for example, is a waste of time and distracts from the bits I want to
read).

Fundamentally the advert model for the internet is broken in that unlike other
advertising mediums you require my opt-in to see the adverts (if I buy a
magazine I have to buy the pages with the adverts, if I watch broadcast TV (I
don't) I have to sit through the adverts, if I go to the cinema I have to sit
through the interminable trailer adverts but on the internet I really don't).

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taewookim
Very detailed explanation. Thanks.

