I keep telling advertisers but if they continue using intrusive ads that send information to Facebook or appear after content has loaded forcing us to misclick, then they can expect more people to use ad blockers. Yet they all want to act like they’re not responsible for this trend even though they are.

It’s not that simple, unfortunately. Even if you were concerned about the impact of using an adblocker, the ads are not like billboards, merely visual distractions, but rather ads now include invasive tracking and surveillance, and other malicious code that can freeze or make a website unusable. Ads often create an accessibility nightmare for some users. They also tend to use up data, making the internet less accessible to those in third world countries where internet access is slow and large data are a bigger problem.

There have been some half-hearted attempts to create standards for advertisements, but the reality is that greed has always undermined attempts for the private sector to self-regulate on this issue, so short of some kind of legislative action to curb these problems, you are going to get people trying to protect themselves with adblockers.