At this point, if you browse the internet without an adblock; it is on YOU.

I'm trying to think in the other (wrong) direction. If we can't escape funding things with advertising the document format can be improved to facilitate what people are trying to build. If each page view needs to be a full multiplayer auction it doesn't need to be this heavy. Not creating something like this will also exclude sane minds from what should and what shouldn't be included and put a price tag on questionable things. For ad platforms micro payments are normal. One can already pay for participating in the auction. If you fail to win the top slots your ticket is still good for less popular ones etc

Thank God for uMatrix. Seriously, I don't know how I lived without that thing. Load times on everything are at least 30% faster.

I immediately thought of this article: https://growtika.com/blog/tech-media-collapse . These websites are losing market share to search and AI; clinging to their business model I suspect they are forced to display an inordinate amount of advertising to make up for their dwindling views. The value they provide is still there, but the advertising revenue that paid for it is not.

This reminds me of the bug I experienced on gcp console with dark reader. Somehow this caused a memory leak, and one could watch the page slowly consume GBs of memory. I once came back from lunch to see it had eaten all ram on my MBP and had consumed a massive amount of swap.

I would not have expected a 'dark mode' extension to cause that.

These ad companies pay for transfer too.

Install AdNauseam if you have unmetered connection and let it download as much data from them as it can.

With adblock loaded, the page loaded a whopping 10MB, after scrolling all the way to the bottom.

So yeah. It might be bad, but I can only recommend everyone on low-data-rates/plans to always use an adblock/contentblocker.

(169 requests, 10.59MB / 3.28 MB transferred), total time 1.10 min)

And this is why I pi-hole (although I am thinking of changing to technitium)

The first Harry Potter ebook (with art) was about 1.3mb.

The average news article text (only) is usually less than 20 kb.

37 millibar? That's quite the bird's eye view.