Ads are a litmus test for how much a service values its users and the ecosystem it’s built upon. When premium cable first replaced broadcast television it had no ads in lieu of a subscription cost. Now you pay a subscription and get ads. The same is true for streaming services which switched to ad supported subscriptions. Let’s look at YouTube; in the early years ads were few and far between, then came mid roll ads, then end roll ads, then multiple ads in a row. Now YouTubers started doing their own ad reads, baked into the video. We’re in a growth oriented era, so companies and individuals will take more and more, as much as they can to keep the numbers going up. What they’re taking is your time; a very precious commodity in my opinion.

Why do I Adblock? Because a line must be drawn or else this marketing growth engine will consume everything. I mean literally without any consumer pushback this attention extraction engine will continue expanding until every moment of digital consumption is monetized. It’s already destroyed too much of the internet.