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Author: Some Content Guy
Thu Oct 15 2026
The INTERNET - For as long as I have been doing creative work and posting it on the internet, I have been running ads on my sites. Because I understand the importance of creative people monetizing their content, I have avoided using ad blockers when visiting other people's sites. Well... That's changing now. I'm installing ad blockers on all devices. My reasoning for doing so is the purpose of this article.
As I mentioned, I run ads on my sites. I run ads on the site that you are reading. But you may notice that those ads are mostly in-house, meaning that they point to other projects of mine or are affiliate links. Only about 10% of the ads that show up are served by Google AdSense. The ones that do, are off to the side or the bottom, don't cover content, and are small and unobtrusive.
To me, that seems to be the most sensible way to run ads. Put them there, and if people are interested, they will click through. Most people don't, and that's fine too. Exposure still happens. That has always been my position on this stuff. And it's not just me. If you have ever worked with something like Google AdSense, they have very strict rules and protocols about how and where ads should be shown. They don't like low content. The don't like ads obscuring parts of the site, or sites that run more ads than content.
That's what they say anyway. Those seem to be rules that they enforce with an iron fist for smaller sites like mine. But they seem to relax those rules, or ignore them completely for most other sites. And I have no idea why.
But I digress... Complaining about how Google handles their policies is not what this is about.
What this is about is how the internet is just absolutely clogged and bogged down by all the ad traffic out there. It's not just the ads on your screen either. Every time you go to ANY site, there are lists of scripts that run in the background so you never see what they are doing. They log, track, report, inform other scripts, and 1000 other things all at once. Not only does all of that activity invade your privacy and instantly inform the ad vendors of all of your activity, all of that stuff processes in your CPU and RAM. And it slows your machine to a crawl. This is especially bad on older machines.
What we are seeing happening looks something like this...
Years ago, sites would sell ad space directly to advertisers. Fixed price for a banner, no trackers, minimal load. But then ad networks like Google AdSense and a few 10,000 others took over. These systems sell space based on users, data, and trackers, not site context. This caused the ad supply out there to explode across millions of sites, dropping the value to fractions of a penny. So now, for ads to be worth anything, sites need to run more of them. And because those ads were getting ignored more, they need to run ads that caught more attention, like video units, sticky ads, interstitials and popovers. And all of them are loaded with heavy JavaScript tracking scripts designed to spy on the user and serve more hyper-targeted ads.
At the same time that this is going on, users are getting fed up with it and installing ad blockers. When this happens, the sites running the ads need to start serving up even MORE invasive content to make up for the lost revenue. This continues to get worse because more and more people get fed up and start installing ad blockers. This has been the cycle for a number of years now. I am one of those users that has finally had enough. And now I am also installing ad blockers. Because I literally, and I mean literally, cannot use any of my machines without them.
To put this into perspective, this is what I mean...
I have 4 machines that I regularly use, because I'm a supernerd like that. All of them are fairly old. A Macbook, an older Chromebook, and a Dell Latitude that runs Linux Lite, are the 3 oldest ones. These machines had gotten to a point that I couldn't even visit many of my favorite sites because the machine would become unresponsive and would take forever just to finish loading, and sometimes not even do that. The machine I'm typing this on right now is a newer Dell machine that was designed for Windows 11 but got SO bogged down that I wiped that out and am now running ChromeFlex on it. That helped, but I still had pretty major problems with my favorite sites. Even my fastest machine wasn't getting through all the noise. Even installing a super-fast OS wasn't enough. So I set up the ad blocker on this machine too.
In all cases, all 4 machines, they run faster, better, and are FAR more responsive than they have for years. It had not occurred to me just how much of my time was being wasted. It didn't realize just how much work these machines were doing in effort to track my behavior and serve up ads. Like 90% of the efforts of my entire machine - not just the browser - were being put to use in ad networks. I am so impressed by how much of a difference this made, that I decided to write about this experience. My machines are finally functional again.
I should have done this years ago. I was putting too much faith in the people running sites. I was giving too much credit to sites that were saying that they needed that ad revenue to survive. I was foolish to assume that anyone would ever actually do something to fix this mess up. I waited too long. I wasted too much of my own time and resources because I didn't want to be the bad guy. I didn't want to be the leech that was taking content and not allowing the site owner to be credited for it.
But you know what? Screw that. I don't feel that way anymore. Because those sites abused my usage. They took advantage of me, and millions of others like me. Those sites jammed increasingly invasive shit into my face while complaining that they had no other choice. And my response to that now is, pffft... Find some other way to make money. Because I'm blocking all that crap now.
This is where I steer this article into the supernerd part of the story...
I'm not using ad blockers as they usually are used. I didn't install an extension on my browser. I'm blocking the ad traffic at the DNS level in the system itself. So nothing gets through.
I tried installing an extension in Chrome, and it worked well enough on this machine. And it helped. But when I tried to install the same extension on my other machines, they were unable to do it. Browser too old and can't be updated... So I had to find another way. It was there that I learned that it was possible to go to the networks settings on my machine, any of them, and tell it to use the IP addresses of an ad blocking network to block ALL ad traffic to the machine, browser or otherwise.
The result has been that my machines run SO much faster. They run like they did in the old days before the ad networks bogged everything down.
Would you like to do this too? Here... This is what you do. Open your network settings. Find the network you are on. Tell it to use THESE servers instead of the default.
Those are the servers for AdGuard. I am not affiliated with them. They do not know that I am writing this article or even know who I am. I am not promoting them in any way other than to point out that they have made those IP addresses available to anyone to use, for free, because that is how they promote their product.
This solution has worked FAR better for me than everything else I'd ever tried. I wish I'd known about it earlier. I wish I had taken steps to guard my own shit earlier.
In Conclusion...
I really hope that the cycle that I've described here breaks at some point. The ad vendors have taken over the entire internet. They are abusing the users. They are stealing your data. They are monetizing your activity. They have made it so that the experience of surfing around websites has become so terrible that people have stopped visiting sites. Part of the reason I'm writing this article now is that I want people to know that blocking this stuff is an option. Using that DNS gateway I described above should be the default for any new machine that you set up. It's time to stop feeding that ad vendors. It's time to cut them off. And that also means cutting off the sites that use them. If their entire business model involves showing you more and more invasive and abusive content, you have the option to prevent them from doing that.
A note to sites that insist that they need to run these increasingly invasive ads in order to keep the lights on, no. No you don't. You don't need to keep abusing your user base. It is still entirely possible to run ads on your site that don't follow that abusive model. Rather than investing in ways to run MORE and more intrusive ads, find ways to run ads that are smarter.
If you would like to support my efforts without seeing ads, and indeed everything else I do, please visit my collections and make some purchases.
Forest Finds (A tutorial for creating your own collection.)
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