They call it "dark traffic" - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.

Not surprised that its growing. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and its only getting worse, and will continue to get worse every month.

My DNS is from controld.com.

What you do is you log into your router and on the local area network page there's generally a section to change the DNS settings of your router and you just put in the IP addresses that control D gives you.

You can also set it up on iOS and Android so that you are also protected when you leave your home network and are on the go on your cellular network.

As I said, along with Control-D, I also use U-Block Origin to catch anything that it might miss.

The other thing to do is use as many open source applications as you can possibly get away with.

They call it "dark traffic" - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.

Not surprised that its growing. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and its only getting worse, and will continue to get worse every month.

Name and shame. Who's the link aggregator?

They call it "dark traffic" - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.

Not surprised that its growing. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and its only getting worse, and will continue to get worse every month.

Almost 70. Spent way too many years watching cable shit tv. I hate ads. I fucking hate ads with a nuclear passion. I have ad blockers, pirated shit and some services that do not show ads so far.
If there are ads I find an alternative or read a book. Our teen son screams ad every time he sees one that sneaks through ad just to get me going.

They call it "dark traffic" - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.

Not surprised that its growing. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and its only getting worse, and will continue to get worse every month.

“The growth of dark traffic undermines the ability of publishers to fund the production of quality content, or even operate as a business. We must recognise users are not the main driver causing this.”

"It’s demonetising publisher content at scale without user consent."

They act like we don't know what we are doing and want the ads. People who block ads in browsers like ddg and brave choose those browsers for that reason.

They call it "dark traffic" - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.

Not surprised that its growing. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and its only getting worse, and will continue to get worse every month.

They call it "dark traffic" - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.

Not surprised that its growing. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and its only getting worse, and will continue to get worse every month.

Using an ad blocker makes me tech savvy? Oh, la, la. Hand me my monocle and glass of schardonayegh.

I mean, basically yes? Do you think most people ever touched the addons button?

I feel like one thing doesn't get talked about enough is that websites feel the need to implement ad services that want to track the user in order to serve ads. Which I just find weird, the expectation to give up ones privacy, just to get served an ad.

Instead, the ads should just be relevant to the content of the page where an ad is embedded, which would automatically make it relevant to the reader, without tracking them.

GitHer

People don’t mind ads for the most part it’s the fact that they take over 3/4 of the screen and generally try to be as obnoxious as possible.

If we stuck with banner ads no one would care, but they just had to make ads as shitty as possible.

Using an ad blocker makes me tech savvy? Oh, la, la. Hand me my monocle and glass of schardonayegh.

Yeah no, I have seen multiple businesses closing down due to poor marketing promotion/budget.

And then we all complain that we didn't know about a certain product/service because they didn't market it good enough (we have seen it a lot of times with movies for example, then they turn into obscure classics with the pass of time, but not really profitable), also some games that didn't really made themselves known while in critical selling weeks?

Who is gonna be the brave soul to release a game when GTA VI appears? That would be marketing suicide, no matter how good your game is.

I run uBlock Origin for the browsers, and Pi-Hole for the network. Plus a wireguard VPN server that my phone connects to when I’m not on the home wifi for ad-blocking on the go.

Pi-hole. You’ll want to run two, because machines will use both a primary and a secondary server for their DNS requests. If you don’t want to buy a pair of raspberry pi’s, you can run it in Docker, which basically keeps it isolated to its own tiny virtual machine. So you’d just need to spin up a pair of docker containers to run the pair of pi-holes. If you’re using Docker, they’ll need a pair of volumes too, or else they’ll lose all of their data every time they reboot.

You’ll want this to be on a machine that is running 24/7, because any time it shuts down, your internet will essentially stop working. That’s why lots of people end up just throwing a few raspberry pis in a closet and forgetting about them.

Once it’s installed, you’ll need to load it with block lists. The default ones are pretty basic. I’d just google something like “pihole blocklists” and figure it out from there. Each list will be a URL, which allows the pihole to pull updates, (which you can tell it to do via the built-in web UI).

They call it "dark traffic" - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.

Not surprised that its growing. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and its only getting worse, and will continue to get worse every month.