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.
The main clencher that got me running a blocker were the few sites whose payload was 90% ad related and as long as the page was open it kept feeding me more ads until a gigabyte of RAM and 5% of my CPU were dedicated to something I wasn’t even looking at.
Ex was mad that my PiHole was blocking some FB stuff so I turned it off.
“The internet’s slow.”
Looked over her shoulder and pointed to her (still loading) screen:
“Ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad…”
“FINE! Turn it back on!”
Don’t date stupid people. Incentivize intelligence.
I know surgeons who can’t start a zoom call. Being uneducated in a particular area is not stupidity. If you avoid dating someone over their lack of adtech knowledge, I would assume they are the one that dodged a bullet.
adtech is nothing new or exotic. We have been dealing with this shit for years. if they still do not have a very basic knowledge of it by now, that’s not a great sign.
Unix and lawnmowers are nothing new or exotic either. I’m not stupid for not knowing how to repair a lawnmower, and I wouldn’t presume you’re stupid just because I can run circles around you at the command line.
I would, however, question your intelligence if you lack the ability to perceive the reasons behind different people knowing different things. It’s not that complicated.
Oh I’m fully aware people can specialize their intelligence, focusing so much on some areas they neglect others and fall behind. However, that’s also a choice they made. That unbalanced tech tree was their own doing.