Ad Blockers and the Nuisance at the Heart of the Modern Web - The New York Times

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"1765","attributes":{"class":"media-image alignleft","typeof":"foaf:Image","style":"","width":"308","height":"190","alt":""}}]]The great philosopher Homer Simpson once memorably described alcohol as “the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.” Internet advertising is a bit like that — the funder of and terrible nuisance baked into everything you do online.Advertising sustains pretty much all the content you enjoy on the web, not least this very newspaper and its handsome, charming technology columnist; as I’ve argued before, many of the world’s most useful technologies may never have come about without online advertising. But at the same time, ads and the vast, hidden, data-sucking machinery that they depend on to track and profile you are routinely the most terrible thing about the Internet. Source: Ad Blockers and the Nuisance at the Heart of the Modern Web - The New York Times