I have literally sat in an executive's office and tried to argue we should remove ads from a brand/sote/app. They pulled up the revenue breakdown for that brand and showed how 20% of that brands income was from those ads. They then offered that i can immediately lay off 2 engineers from my teams and we could go forward with no ads. I would also not be able to add any more positions until i was able to innovate enough to make up for that amount plus the lost revenue. Or i could just stfu and leave the ads. I dont like ads either... but in this case the company had clearly painted themselves into a corner. That among other reasons lead me to go work for a different company that was more honest.

What of my former employees? Ad revenue dropped and traffic dropped anyhow (ad blockers and people who dont like ads). I get it... i dont like what was going on too. They got rid of several engineers anyhow (my replacement did). Now this is the part that i am not making up and show scare the shit out of you. Both of the engineers that left in the last year went to work for spyware companies. They now develop browser toolbars, apps that scrape your info from your phone, and systems that sell your data to who ever wants to buy it. We have a few companies like that in my area. They are growing at a breathtaking rate and every engineer who cant find a job, goes to work for them. So perhaps it isnt that you are dumb... maybe you just havent had to make hard decisions because of what ad blockers do... or you are stupid. Yep, back to my original statement... 99.99% of people are too stupid to realize that what they are doing with ad blockers is slowly creating a situation they will greatly regret.