this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
964 points (99.2% liked)

Technology

73035 readers
4041 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
L4s@hackingne.ws
964
Adblockers stop publishers serving ads to (or even seeing) 1bn web users - Press Gazette (pressgazette.co.uk)
submitted 1 day ago by 1984@lemmy.today to c/technology@lemmy.world
262 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Gibibit@lemmy.world 52 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

They got it the wrong way around. Visitors who use adblock are not "dark traffic", the bullshit scripts and tracking they use are dark. The adblock users are actually the only clean traffic. The adblockers aren't "brutal", the people without blockers are being brutalized.

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 17 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

"dark" as in "not visible". Adblock users can't be tracked (or at least not as easily), hence they are not visible to the ad companies. "Dark", in this instance, is not a derogatory term.

"Brutal" is, though. So I totally agree with you there. Ads are the brutal thing nowadays.

[–] burntbacon@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

The way you word things matters. How many polls have shown the difference in opinion on 'obamacare' compared to 'affordable care act?'

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 1 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

That is not wrong. But interpreting "dark" as "evil" is just wrong in this context.

[–] AntEater@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 8 hours ago

You may be right, technically, but based on the context, I'm quite sure the use of the word "dark" here is intended to frame the behavior as negative. It's just like when various media authors refer to TOR as the "dark web" even though it has countless valid uses that are not enabling illegal/immoral behaviors.