Ad Blocking and the Future of Web Analytics

This morning I caved and installed an ad blocker in my primary browser. I’d resisted for years, believing that advertising was paying for the sites I enjoyed, so subverting that advertising was tantamount to stealing. I also both run a site that sometimes gets support from advertisers, and pay to advertise our business on other people’s sites. So I’m culpable, and blocking felt at best hypocritical. But enough is enough.

Large parts of the commercial web have become unusable due to advertising. Diminishing revenues have resulted in more ads per page, and ridiculous over-pagination of content, resulting in less...