• Kentronix@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I use ad blockers but it isn’t lost on me that services I use cost money to operate. That money is provided by selling data and ad clicks.

    Because of ad blockers trying to cut off the revenue source we end up with a battle between companies and users where the most popular browser on the planet is adding things like this - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrity-api-sounds-like-drm-for-the-web/

    I’d much rather provide the revenue for the services I find valuable and not have a ton of middleware enforcing web drm to ensure I’m advertised to.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That money is provided by selling data and ad clicks.

      The ROI on selling bulk data and forwarding ads vastly outweighs whatever change you’re dropping into the meter. Even if you do pay for a premium service, your data is still going to get collected and you’re still going to look at ads, because why would Google just pass up on that money?

      You’ll have the data collection and ads obfuscated, through some combination of variant interfaces and marketing language and dense, unreadable EULAs. But its going to happen no matter how much you pay, because its cheaper to lie to you than to forgo this data collection.

      I’d much rather provide the revenue for the services I find valuable and not have a ton of middleware enforcing web drm to ensure I’m advertised to.

      But that’s just it. We’re not going towards an either/or model. We’re going to a both model.

    • Ann Archy@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Are you making the argument that ad blocking software is the reason for companies aggressively mining user data?

      • Kentronix@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’m arguing that add blockers are causing companies like Google to fight ad blockers. They aggressively mine data because it’s profitable to target ads with it.

        If millions of people didn’t use as blockers there wouldn’t be much of a reason for them to spend engineering dollars on Web Identity DRM tools to attempt to prevent changes to web pages by blockers.