This browser blocks ads.
This site carries them.

What an ad blocker is actually blocking

Ad blockers are not squeamish about commerce. What they block is a specific mechanism: your browser being sent off to a third party that you never chose to visit, which then records that you were here, and recognises you again on the next site, and the next, until it has assembled a fairly good picture of your week.

The advert is the visible part. The tracking is the point. Filter lists like EasyPrivacy exist to break that second half — and Splitser ships them on by default, which is why the shield in every pane shows a running count.

What's in the column here

A tile forty pixels wide, in a strip down the edge of the page. It is served by this site: your browser asks splitser.org for it, the same way it asks for the text you are reading. It never contacts the ad network, because it never needs to — this server asks Pixboard, and passes the tiles back through its own address.

Nothing follows you. There is no third-party request, no cookie set by anyone but us, no script from elsewhere, no identifier that survives the page. The advertiser learns that their tile was shown a number of times. They do not learn who you are, and neither do we.

There is exactly one exception, and it only happens if you ask for it. Hover a tile and the card has a small flag in the corner for reporting a scam or a phishing ad. If you click it, the report goes to Pixboard through this site. It needs some way to tell one person reporting ten ads from ten people reporting the same one — otherwise a single determined clicker outweighs a real problem — so this server works out a token for you: it takes the first three parts of your address, mixes them with a secret that exists only on this machine, and sends the one-way result. Not your address. Pixboard cannot turn the token back into you, because they do not have the secret, and the token is the same for everyone on your stretch of the network anyway.

That is the only time anything derived from you leaves this site at all, it happens only on a click you choose to make, and nothing about it is silent. If you would rather send nothing, don't press the flag — nothing else on the page behaves differently either way.

It also stays out of the way, which is the other half of the bargain. Nothing is injected between paragraphs, nothing slides up from the bottom, nothing expands as you scroll past it, and nothing pushes the page around while it decides what to show. The column is at the edge, it is the same size on every page, and it is labelled Paid because you should not have to work out which parts of a page were bought.

The honest part

The network in that column is Pixboard, and the same person builds it and Splitser. So this is not a disinterested endorsement — it is one of ours, and it pays for the other one. Being told that plainly is better than working it out.

You can also just block it. Nothing here detects blockers, nags about them, or withholds anything if the column does not load. The downloads, the source and every page work exactly the same either way.

The longer argument for putting ads at the edge rather than through the middle — and why the sidebar was worth going back to — is written up here.