I’ve been whitelisting sites I love that depend on ad revenue for a while now. But in all honesty, the online ad industry brought this upon themselves. Nobody is using adblockers to block small, unobtrusive ads. We use them to block bandwidth-hungry, processor-intensive Flash ads that slow down every page load and force us to see ads before we see the content we came for.

The sites that host these ads are just as culpable as the ad networks. They chose to go for ad revenue over an optimised user experience, and now they’re paying the price.

So I’ll keep whitelisting sites that I know depend on ad revenue and use ad networks that aren’t going to serve up any irritating Flash ads (eg http://decknetwork.net/), but most people aren’t. And you can’t blame them.