I would like to read a version of this article not written by someone in marketing... > The reasons for the epidemic are unclear... Sure, sure they are. Nobod

I would like to read a version of this article not written by someone in marketing... > The reasons for the epidemic are unclear... Sure, sure they are. Nobody's really sure why users don't love the advertising networks embedded in everything, making greater and greater incursions into privacy and carrying a greater threat of malware than email. Not sure at all. > German opposition to online advertising that manifests itself in the government’s obsessive anti-Google stance... Snowden who? > Technically, Eyeo GmbH, the company that dominates the trade has “improved” in every dimensions. "I put improved in quotes because I'm trying to write a 'fair and balanced' article about a product that threatens my livelihood." > In January the company announced a new feature that allows large scale deployment of Adblock Plus (ABP) in corporate networks. Good, that will be a big help to corporate IT. They'll have a lot less, "um, my computer says it's infected" calls. > According to Shine’s chief marketing officer Roi Carthy, the proliferation of invasive formats displayed on mobile — popups, auto-play videos — accounts for 10% to 50% of a carrier’s network capacity. "...reasons [for ad blocking's spread] are unclear..." > ...the ad community is quick to forget that it dug its own grave by flooding the web with intolerable amounts of promotional formats. ...and by not policing its own networks, which moved the debate over ad-blocking from convenience to security, which was huge. > ...branded contents are seen by publishers as a credible alternative to invasive formats that disfigure web sites. In their latest giant act of contempt for their readers, publishers have entirely abandoned ethics and are now quietly mixing commercial content in with actual content and then wondering why anybody doesn't love that. > In Scandinavia, Schibsted is hard at work on an initiative to raise user awareness by getting many sites to close down access to browsers carrying and ad block extension. lol. Good luck with that. I think the best-case scenario there is that the internet becomes less of a time sink. > ...opt-in, i.e. register with a valid email address. Yes, you will get ads, but on a selective basis... "Trust us, we'll be as selective with our advertising as we've been for the last 10 years." > Branded Content that I see as another form of editorial "My opinions and reputation are for sale, I don't see a problem with that." Good grief. I've been dumbfounded that online advertising has continued for so long, seemingly unaffected by the continuing rise of ad-blocking. Ad-blocking's ubiquity has been making the rounds in the news every year or so for at least a few years now, but the online advertising market has only gotten more obnoxious in response. I'm intensely curious what will happen once things do come to a head. Publishers and ad networks keep promising that the web can't survive without advertising; users keep promising they aren't going to tolerate the tactics that advertising networks and publishers have been using for years.