I do find it interesting that the author specifies they use an ad blocker whilst also wanting to view the industry 'from the inside'. I'm not sure there isn't a level of hypocrisy there, albeit understandable.

As staunchly anti-advertising, I wouldn't include advertising on anything I publish personally, but then I also don't publish anything, so I have no pressure to change my stance. I think I've convinced myself that my opinion doesn't matter to those who may be able to earn a decent stream from advertising (as much as I dislike that, and as much as I dislike my opinion being value-less).

The problem is not the marketing of services and products.

The problem is the vector for tracking and for installing malware on users' browsers. I'd actually love to be notified when interesting products are available - but I block ads out of the defensive stance that the advertising industry pushed many people into.

Well, I think either way, Internet ads are dead for the most part. They have been dead for many years now. They started exactly the same way and went through the same flow. There were all kinds of ads: ads to install junk, ads that were totally misleading, ads that were very sexual in nature just to tempt users into clicking them, and ads that were totally irrelevant to the topic of the website or the user's interests.

But then it got so bad that people started using ad blockers long ago, and they got rid of this mess. Later, companies slowly started moving away from Internet advertising in general, and when the mobile and smartphone market started to take off, all the money flowed into that world instead. If you look at the way ads work in the mobile industry, even today, they are full of junk and incentivize users to install apps and perform specific actions. There is an equal amount of junk and misleading content in mobile ads today, like there used to be in Internet ads more than a decade ago. But right now, we are at that point. Mobile ads will also start getting muted one way or the other, and there will be huge incentive and opportunity sitting on top of that right there.

To add to this specific article, though, I would say it would have hardly made a difference anyway for the author in 2025.

It's an act of self-protection. I'm not anti-advertising. I'm anti-running-untrusted-software on my property. If they had stuck to adwords and static images with no invasive tracking I'd let their ads run. But the surveillance capitalists can't help themselves and want to run their 50MB spyware payload on my computer. I say no to that garbage.

There's no contradiction; ad blocker usage is common within the industry.