this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
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Adblockers stop publishers serving ads to (or even seeing) 1bn web users - Press Gazette (pressgazette.co.uk)
submitted 2 days ago by 1984@lemmy.today to c/technology@lemmy.world
347 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

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[–] spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works 101 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Besides the miserable experience unchecked advertisements cause, it is simply not safe to allow those advertisements to load.

A few years ago (before SSDs were common) I noticed unusual hard disk activity when loading a popular link aggregation site. A bit of investigation turned up a Trojan on my system. After removing it and reloading that site, my PC was immediately reinfected. The site owner denied any responsibility and said it was the advertising company's fault.

The way the Internet operates now means no one is responsible for the content their site provides or the damage they cause. Imagine if restaurant owners were able to deny responsibility for the atmosphere in their restaurants or food poisonings they caused? IMO it's the same thing.

Advertisers and websites have created the "dark traffic" mentioned here by repeatedly poisoning the public and they deserve the massive loss of revenue their behavior has caused.

[–] BassTurd@lemmy.world 30 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Name and shame. Who's the link aggregator?

[–] 418_im_a_teapot@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 day ago

It’s happened directly on Google before. Advertisers aren’t vetted except in specific industries. It could happen on any site, trusted or not.

[–] JayGray91@piefed.social 17 points 2 days ago

but it's icky to say its name 🥺🥺🥺

joking aside, I'd wager it's reddit