I recommend you check out StevenBlack's Amalgamated hosts file: https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

  Currently the hosts files from the following locations are amalgamated:
    MVPs.org Hosts file at http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm, updated monthly, or thereabouts.
    Dan Pollock at http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ updated regularly.
    Malware Domain List at http://www.malwaredomainlist.com/, updated regularly.
    Peter Lowe at http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/, updated regularly.
    hpHosts at http://hosts-file.net/, updated regularly
    My own small list in raw form here.

I've been using a different one (http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt), which is roughly the same size. However, their entries seem quite different (only 1921 common domains out of 11356+13586 total). Maybe they should be merged.

It would be very interesting to perform an analysis of the differences and merge them, I agree.

I've found some content won't appear/work if ads are blocked. So in some cases I temporarily whitelist a site in AdBlock or Ghostery. With a HOSTS file, isn't that sort of thing a lot more painful?

(I used to use the HOSTS method but stopped for that reason.)

This has yet to affect me to the point of me actually noticing that anything was broken. The worst I'll see is a lot of extraneous whitespace on a webpage where an ad would have been.

That said, frankly, if a web site won't work properly because it can't load content from an ad network, then it's probably not a site I'd want to visit and pull information from.

They work well, but the only problem is I've found is they can have a lot of false-positives.

Stuff like redirects that sites use to track links can get blocked and you can't follow links on a page, etc.

Whoa, that's intense. Definitely going to try this out when my new laptop arrives! Thanks!