Ad Blockers: Publishers Face Crisis in AI Era

Shirley Marschall traces the rise of ad blocking from mailbox stickers to modern digital formats, arguing that both users and publishers have paid a price for intrusive ads. The piece notes the 2015 surge as the 'year of the ad blocker' and explains how later generations—privacy browsers, VPNs, networks, apps, and extensions—blocked not only ads but critical publisher functions like analytics, paywalls, and consent flows. It describes a GenAI-era wave where ad slots are ignored by default, with tools such as Comet and LLM crawlers bypassing ads. As a result, publishers lose traffic, monetization, and content visibility, while dark traffic (over a billion users, about 18% of internet traffic) remains unmeasured. The FBI’s guidance to use ad blockers to avoid scams in search ads underscores the tension between user protection and monetization. The article concludes that publishers face ongoing challenges as AI-era blocking and scraping reshape the ecosystem.