If the online ad industry was just about serving ads you could say that I guess. Early Internet ads were usually placed pretty intrusively on websites, and very soon went from annoyance to security risk as ads became a disturbingly common vehicle for malware delivery. Today malware via ads is far less common but an ad isn’t just an ad – now ads are powered by, and an agent of, a surveillance network.

If an ad could just be an ad it would actually be safe to roll without an ad blocker; I would infact do so as well unless a site was really egregious with their ad placement, I want to support websites doing good work. The Internet ad industry forced us into blocking their ads. My adblock never turns off, even for sites I’d very much like to support, because ads are just a pile of malicious code. Ad blockers would have stayed niche techy things if the ad industry wasn’t scummy as hell.

So anyways, I feel I got a little rant-y. My point is that the ad industry themselves fed the demand for ad blockers. Ads themselves and website placement didn’t get egregious because of ad blockers, ad blockers became common because ads and ad placement got egregious.