I don’t think this is a particularly bold take — but I’m not afraid to say that ad blockers are good!
Ever since I started using one sometime in 2016, my experience of using the internet has improved exponentially. I can finally easily find a recipe for dinner on a random influencer’s blog, get a faster answer to “how to replace my car’s headlights” and likely avoid hundreds of pieces of malvertising.
But their use has increasingly come into question with YouTube’s new policies on preventing users from using ad blockers on its site, with new warnings saying the user has a certain number of videos they can watch before they must allowlist youtube.com in their ad blocker, thus allowing the site to display ads before YouTube videos.
The second this popped up for me two weeks ago, I immediately started researching workarounds and quickly found a secure solution that works for my browsing habits. The easy explanation for why Google (YouTube’s parent company) wants to get rid of ad blockers is, simply, money. They run the Google Ads service that provides the stereotypical ads everyone has been used to seeing on websites since the early aughts. Unfortunately, bad actors will often use enticing headlines, fake images or sales pitches to trick people into clicking on links that lead to malicious sites, attacker-run scams or downloads that are malware.
Ad blockers are a major tool users can deploy to block this type of threat, so the explanation for why everyone should be using one is also clear.
Google isn’t the only ..
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