That was a good read!
I use an ad blocker in my main browser and the difference in page load times is often staggering. When you take into consideration how much data ads use on some sites an ad blocker can shave many seconds off loading time by cutting out images, remote CSS and often a ton of Javascript, not least adding several extra http requests to 3rd party sites.
One area where ads are often very noticable is on small screens (aka mobile), having to download an extra chunk of data on an already slow connection can be very painful at the best of times.
I think the whole ad situation has got out of hand. We all know the sites that show 6, even a dozen ads on a page. Because of ever dwindling ad clicks what the ad men seem to be doing is firefighting by shoving more and more ads on a page in the vain hope that one will get a click - they’re not really tacking the underlying issue.
Perhaps it’s time that the ad men need to rethink outside the box - old style ads don’t work, instead they need to be using “value added content” approach. Give me an interesting text ad that’s related to the article I’m reading instead of flashing images and I may consider unblocking my ad-blocker 