As a publisher, and as an adblock user, the prevalence of low quality ads that ‘follow’ you around the net reminding you to buy stuff you don’t care about, stuff you already bought, stuff that the algo reckons you should be interested, crud, malware, attempted drive by downloads, etc, etc. makes me yearn for the days when ads matched site content accurately, … if you visit a coffee site, you got coffee ads… no ads for abs or underwear or pointless game downloads.
I use ad blockers because otherwise I won’t visit certain sites due to the sheer ad overload. I’m looking at Taboola type ad sites, with lines that state: “Click here to see cars at unbelievable prices in ***,***” then when you click you realize it’s a s*t-hole of more ads with not much of relevance: ad-bait and ad-switch. Demeaning to the real advertisers and demeaning to the honest and hard-working publishers.
If you want to win people’s trust, as a publisher, … dial down the ads, dial up the conversation, nix advertisers that harm or deceive your audience, and keep it honest.
So let’s reframe the original question as: “How much of our audience do we lose because our sites are ad-heavy, poorly ad-optimized, or serving just junk ads?” Once you know the answer to both questions, then you’ll be in a position to decide if you want to follow the audience or the loot (as if the one existed without the other!)”.