Wow. Devtools performed a second reload of the page to get an overall performance analysis. This time it downloaded 12MB – a little over 7MB in that is JavaScript!
I run ad blocking software and Ghostery on every browser (soon in iOS9 once it ships) the reason is not that I don’t believe in supporting blogs with ad dollars. I don’t want to be tracked all over the web and I encourage anyone to take up blocking tracking cookies everywhere. Not only does it anonymize you a bit more than normal but it saves data requests. My homepage on this site hits Google for font libraries and Google Analytics and that’s it. If you go to my blog, you’ll see WP.com (Stats), Analytics, Flickr (photos), Instapaper (bookmarklet links) and Gravatar (wordpress site). So I’m tracking people 2 ways and, serving up some images from Flickr. This is very minimalist but I’m also not serving an advertisements.
If we all take up blocking being tracked on the web, advertisers will eventually relent and stop tracking us.
I’d prefer to support a site financially than see ads. My yearly Internet spending used to be quite high but these days, I spend roughly $500 a year on ‘services’. That includes Flickr and 500PX subscriptions, web hosting, BackBlaze, DropBox and domain registrations as well as small monthly fees that I auto Paypal to Podcast producers, authors and newspapers. Paying for a service is worth the peace of mind of not being bombarded with ads or being tracked.
Unfortunately, most people value a dollar more than they do their privacy.