Another year of being the Domain Expert of scam-by-mail gadgets, obsolete ABS codes, and water heater anode rods:
Plotting the log of page views against posts in descending order of popularity gives a power-law relationship of some sort:
The log-log view has odd discontinuities:
Overall page views are down 30% from last year: 205k vs 290k.
WordPress served 1 million ads (vs 1.2 million in 2018) on those 205k page views, nearly five ads per page view, which seems horrifying. If you’re not using an ad blocker, you surely have difficulty finding the blog post amid all the crap.
The implosion of on-line advertising continues apace, however, as WordPress paid only 63% as much per ad: $0.40 (vs $0.70 in 2018) per thousand views. Obviously, ads on WordPress blogs aren’t worth much these days.
Recommendations:
- Set up PiHole on a Raspberry Pi to cut the clutter from all devices on your home network
- Install both Ublock Origin (not Ublock nor Adblock) and Privacy Badger on all your Firefox installations
- Stop using Chrome / Chromium
While I could pay WordPress their upgrade ransom to eliminate the ads, it’s better if you defend yourself by eliminating all ads, wherever they may be.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
3 responses to “Blog Summary: 2019”
For what it’s worth, I do well with Adblock Latitude and NoScript on Pale Moon (on LInux). PM recommends against NoScript, because some websites do poorly unless certain scripts are allowed. OTOH, they’ll let you override the setting that blocks NoScript.
I’m not familiar with Privacy Badger and don’t know if it will work with Pale Moon.
I only use Firefox for Youtube and other sites that don’t play nicely with Pale Moon.
As usual, YMMV.
When I inadvertently access the site with a browser without an adblockers, 90% of the time, I’m redirected to a “update Flash player” page that’s malware.
WordPress tech support “can’t do anything” without the exact URL of the ad and its target, which neither you nor I can provide, so I’ve given up reporting the malware they serve through the WordAds program. WP seems content to outsource their reputation to a bunch of scoundrels and I’m definitely guilty by association.
I’m (once again) thinking of moving everything to a different platform, but I’d rather tinker in the shop than perform sysdamin duties, so I’m taking the path of least resistance by doing nothing. [sigh]