Dangerly
Well-Known Member
The two leading reasons for using an ad blocker are removing annoying ads (like this one) and protecting privacy/security. About 30% of desktop and 5% of mobile users in the US use an ad blocker. Ad block usage is much higher outside the US. I use UBlock, which has more technical features for ad blocking than AdBlock Plus, which in fact actually makes money by showing you ads. (Yes, AdBlock Plus gets paid millions of dollars by the likes of Google to show you ads even with AdBlock Plus enabled...) Ghostery is good too. If you're on mobile, try Brave.I gotta say that the pop-up ad that appears in the lower part of literally every page is not only annoying but it appears it is intentionally designed to be difficult to close. There is no visible “x”. If you try to touch the upper right corner it takes me usually 3-4 tries to close it. More than annoying. I understand the need for ads but this is over-reaching.
And yet, advertising helps fund the operation of this site. If you support this site, why would you block their ads? Because they're too annoying or they invade your privacy, is the answer.
And here's where hopefully the site operators will take notice and maybe dial back their ad experience a bit, to prevent more people from using ad blockers. If they did this, they could ask users with ad blockers to let their ads in to support the site.