SponsorBlock – Skip over sponsorship segments on YouTube

- the more people that use adblock/sponsor block, the less effective ads are in general (lower advertiser ROI for each ad)

- if ROI for ads drop, ad sellers (eg. youtubers) have to reduce the price charged to advertisers

- given that ad budgets are more or less constant (companies will always need to reach customers) there will simply be more ads, since each ad view is now worth less.

- if ads become completely ineffective (eg. reddit) ads will simply become disguised as content to get past people's filter (aka content marketing, submarine articles etc)

Are the people who tend to use adblock likely to actually engage with the ads with adblock off?

Yeah, I always wondered if adblockers actually _improved_ per ad engagement, as users of an adblocker are opting themselves out of advertisement (thereby removing themselves from "inventory"), and seem like they would be less likely overall to engage with ads, and thus the adblocker usage is reducing the number of non-engaging users.

Sure, overall "inventory" would go down, but I would expect for ads that actually make it to users, per-ad engagement/ROI (and thus "value") to go up.

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Unless ad networks are charging advertisers for ad units that aren't actually shown to anybody, which smells an awful lot like grift to me!

(effectively charging for hidden ad units to inflate numbers)

As existence proof, I buy stuff I see when I'm watching TV at someone else's place or when I use Instagram (which has ads right in the Stories feed). I see no reason why I'm special since I'm a pretty normal user when I'm using these things.