4 ms·

And what about user experience? It's times like these where I do not feel guilty about using an adblock, despite being a publisher myself, and hosting google ad

And what about user experience? It's times like these where I do not feel guilty about using an adblock, despite being a publisher myself, and hosting google ads on my website. Is it hypocritical? Probably. But I would think the issue isn't completely black and white. Also, as a publisher who provides educational content (I'm not mentioning my website's name, but it's very, very similar to mentalfloss.com or the TIL reddit subreddit [even though my website has been around longer than both]), increasing the top ads is going to hurt my traffic. It's a bit of a selfish reason but at least I know the people who are searching for those terms are looking for exactly what's on my website. In many cases, my site is the only one with that information.

soared 11y ago
I'm in a similar spot and totally agree. Despite buying tons of ads and having adsense on my sites, I use adblock and other ad/script blocking extensions. It may be hypocritical, but I have a huge huge counterpoint that I've been thinking about writing a big blog post on: AdBlockers help Google. Here is the thought.. If you use an adblocker, you wouldn't be clicking ads anyway. So you are helping advertisers by making their targeting better targeted. We don't even load ads, so they are served to people more likely to click on them. This logic doesn't really work for cpc, but it does for cpm. Also haven't fully thought it through.