It's a sensationalist headline, with some questions assertions.
> 36% percent of people in the UK use an adblocker, which means your javascript based website tracking is meaningless
"meaningless" is a strong word. If I run an ad campaign and see an uptick of 20% visitors, that's useful. The 36% is consistent on both side, so deltas are still very meaningful.
If I do need absolute metric -- e.g. distinct people -- I have to decide how to handle adblocking. I can model it, or I can accept the undercount. Honestly, this is largely going to be based on what the advertisers are welling to accept.
> The black boxes inside Facebook and other ad exchanges give you flat out wrong data about how your ads are performing
When you can tie it back to sales, you have pretty hard data. Also, there's third parties out there if you don't trust companies grading their own homework.
> The audiences you're targeting on Google, Bing, etc are fraudulent and don't even exist
Again, fraudulent is a bit of a stretch. Audiences do have waste. That's true in TV, magazines, and digital. It's not a question of perfect or fraudulent.
You’re right that deltas are still meaningful in aggregate, but in my experience the actions the users take and their retention rates are different. The ad-blocking users are more valuable in my opinion because they are more likely to be power users and advocates for your software. So looking at a graph of feature usage will not accurately portray the weighted value of each feature, based on changes to retention and virality – the devil is in the details.
> 36% percent of people in the UK use an adblocker, which means your javascript based website tracking is meaningless
"meaningless" is a strong word. If I run an ad campaign and see an uptick of 20% visitors, that's useful. The 36% is consistent on both side, so deltas are still very meaningful.
If I do need absolute metric -- e.g. distinct people -- I have to decide how to handle adblocking. I can model it, or I can accept the undercount. Honestly, this is largely going to be based on what the advertisers are welling to accept.
> The black boxes inside Facebook and other ad exchanges give you flat out wrong data about how your ads are performing
When you can tie it back to sales, you have pretty hard data. Also, there's third parties out there if you don't trust companies grading their own homework.
> The audiences you're targeting on Google, Bing, etc are fraudulent and don't even exist
Again, fraudulent is a bit of a stretch. Audiences do have waste. That's true in TV, magazines, and digital. It's not a question of perfect or fraudulent.