Helldiver_M

That’s good to hear! I’m not on iOS but I’ll keep an eye out for the Android solution.

Behind the bastards makes it more bearable because they really take the piss out of the ads every time.

I have not found this to be the case. There are only a few podcasts I felt I enjoyed enough to financially support, and I stopped donations because I still had to sit through ads. I don’t like feeling as if I’m being monetized twice.

Be really cool if more hosts made ad-free supporter versions.

If you can write and have technical know-how, technical writing pays more than journalism.

From the persepctive of the host site, maybe. But for the advertisers, AdNauseam punishes them pretty badly. The idea is to destroy the relationship between the “click through rate” and “conversion rate” of offending sites/ads.

The linked article discusses the phenomena in more detail, but the bottom line is that advertisers want sales. If their ads don’t get sales on a certain platform, they will no longer advertise on said platform.

I’ve also attached a screenshot of the relevant part of the article.
https://www.wordstream.com/average-ctr

That’s without even considering how this screws up the data that organizations like Google are trying to track. That data is worth something to them, and this obfuscates it.

Just to clarify, AdNauseam doesn’t click on every ad. Certainly not by default. I’ve noticed that while it does hide ads embedded in YouTube videos, it doesn’t seem to click them often. (Though, it does still click on image based ads on YouTube).

Additionally, by default AdNauseam does not click on ads that are “do not track” (DNT) compliant, an emerging standard set by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I’ll link to the GitHub FAQ post the devs made regarding why they, by default, don’t click DNT compliant ads.

https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/FAQ#how-and-why-does-adnauseam-make-exceptions-for-non-tracking-ads

It does yes. It also interferes with other privacy related extensions like privacy badger. I have disabled both Ublock Orgin and Privacy Badger in favor of AdNauseam and have been pleased. After using it for about a week, it says I’ve “clicked” on about $150 worth of ads.

The main thing to note is if you’re on a site, and you see ads, you can always flip AdNauseam into “strict” mode. In strict mode, it is less effective at clicking on ads, but better at making sure nothing pops up. There’s only one site that I’ve had to use strict mode on so far. Attached image is of my “ad vault” (the ads that have been clicked). I did hide the NSFW ads: