|More seriously and with (slightly) less snark, I'm always shocked when I surf the internet at work with no ad-blocker. Pop-ups, irritating garish backgrounds, "content" plastered everywhere, and of course, annoying video ads. Its like a bad episode of Futurama; some horrible dystopian disfigurement of the internet.

As the CPM (money you receive per thousand views of an ad) of internet ads has plummeted over the years, sites are resorting to larger and more annoying ads because they pay better.

|And the other thing that gets me is why don't government/private business install ad-blockers by default?

Ad-blockers are a legal grey area. You are costing the service provider valuable resources without giving back anything in return.

> Ad-blockers are a legal grey area.

Not under any legal system I am familiar with.

> You are costing the service provider valuable resources without giving back anything in return.

No, the service provider is dumping a mass of content at you without asking for payment, and you are selecting which of that content you wish to view (and using an automated tool to implement that decision.)

Now, the service provider may be anticipating that some percentage of users will view the ads, but that's not an bargained-for-exchange, and its generally not a legally binding obligation of any users. It may be a moral gray area, but that's a different issue.

Ad-blockers may be a moral grey area, but I'm reasonably confident that there's no ambiguity about their legality (ie, they're totally legal).

And this is one of the reasons why i'm shocked they aren't used. Its seems like a clear win. Cut down on bandwidth use by your employees for relatively little/practically no effort + employees would be happier.

And when have we known a big corporation/government to care about a moral grey area that is legal and in their interests? Hell, that describes half of their operations and even some companies!

Fair enough.

> Ad-blockers are a legal grey area. You are costing the service provider valuable resources without giving back anything in return.

You could turn that argument on the head. When you're blocking ads, you're preventing advertisers from wasting money on you, as you wouldn't have bought anything anyways (for me, annoying online advertising actually lowers the perception of the brand). So, you're doing advertisers a favour by blocking the ads.

The counter to that argument is that an advertiser may not care that you will click the ad, they just want you to be exposed to the product.

Coke has done this for years and many claim this is their key to their globally recognizable brand.

Funny that we both mentioned coke... that's the power of advertising.

I've not met a single person that "likes" advertising, but it works very well despite people's disdain for it (look at coke's market cap and tell me advertising isn't effective).

Advertising is a tricky science, it might be effective on you or it might not. But it is effective on most people, including I would wager, the vast majority of people who block ads.

Ads are often chosen based on a real time auction. You see an ad because someone won an action to show you an ad. Their bidder had the option of not showing you an ad.

> Ad-blockers are a legal grey area. You are costing the service provider valuable resources without giving back anything in return.

If they want to guarantee what code runs on my computer, doing it via a web browser is not the way to go. There is no actual or implied contract between me and the site owner. Site owners have the option of detecting and blocking my adblock-using-traffic. It's not supremely difficult.

Can you send me some of that random-butt-bouncing text?

Better yet, a 15 second silent video?