Ad Blocking: Where It Helps, and Why We Recommend uBlock Origin

What an ad blocker actually does

An ad blocker (technically a content blocker) reads a list of known ad-serving and tracking domains/patterns and stops your browser from loading them. Beyond just hiding banners, a good one also blocks the third-party trackers that follow you across sites to build an advertising profile, blocks a meaningful chunk of malvertising (malware distributed through compromised ad networks), and speeds up page loads by not fetching everything those networks would otherwise pull in.

Where it makes sense to use one

Almost always, honestly — for your own privacy and safety more than out of annoyance at seeing ads:

• Third-party ad networks are the main vector for malvertising, and blocking them removes a real attack surface, not just a cosmetic one.
• Cross-site tracking (the kind that follows you from site to site building a profile) is worth blocking on privacy grounds regardless of how you feel about any individual site's ads.
• Intrusive formats — autoplay video with sound, pop-unders, interstitials that cover the whole page before you can read anything — degrade the browsing experience badly enough that blocking them is close to a strict improvement.
• Slow/bloated pages on ad-heavy sites are frequently the ad network's fault, not the site's own content.

The one place we'd ask you to think twice is disclosed, first-party support for a specific site you want to keep around — more on that below.

Why uBlock Origin

There are a lot of ad blockers; we recommend uBlock Origin specifically:

• It's free, open source, and actively maintained — you can read exactly what it does, not just take a company's word for it.
• It's efficient. uBlock Origin was built to enforce large filter lists with a fraction of the memory/CPU overhead of older blockers, so it doesn't noticeably slow your browser down.
• It doesn't run an "Acceptable Ads" pay-to-unblock program. Some other popular blockers (AdBlock, Adblock Plus) let advertisers pay to have their ads whitelisted by default — meaning what gets through isn't purely a technical judgment about what's intrusive or unsafe, it's partly a business arrangement. uBlock Origin has no such program: everything in its filter lists is blocked, full stop, unless you personally choose to allow it.
• It's available for every major browser (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave, Safari via a compatible fork) directly from each browser's official extension store — search "uBlock Origin" and confirm the publisher is Raymond Hill (gorhill), the original author, to avoid impersonating extensions.

Install it, leave the default filter lists enabled, and you're covered for the vast majority of ad networks and trackers without any further configuration.

How Weave's own ads work

In the interest of not asking you to trust a vague promise: Weave runs its own sponsored placements directly, house-ads style. There is no third-party ad network or ad exchange involved — no real-time bidding, no cross-site tracking pixel, no data broker in the loop. Every sponsored placement on the site is clearly labeled "Sponsored" — that label is a disclosure, not a style choice, and it's never removed regardless of how the ad is served.

Because it's a first-party system, a generic ad blocker's broad domain-level rules mostly don't have anything to catch here — you won't see Weave's own sponsored placements flagged by the same rules that catch a third-party ad exchange, and no attempt is made to disguise them as regular content. If you'd still rather not see them at all, uBlock Origin's per-site cosmetic filtering (right-click an element → "Block element") works the same way here as anywhere else.

If you want to support a site you use

This is entirely optional and your call to make, but it's worth knowing: most ad blockers, including uBlock Origin, let you allowlist individual sites so their ads load normally while everything else stays blocked. In uBlock Origin, click its toolbar icon while on the site and click the big power button to disable blocking there, or add the domain to the allowlist in its settings. Sites that rely on ad revenue (Weave included) stay free to use partly because of readers who choose to do this for the ones they actually want to keep around — but blocking everything everywhere, including here, is a completely reasonable default and not something we'd ask you to change.