Just trying to live with as little advertising as possible and curious what tips or tricks the community has aside from moving out to a cabin in the woods.
I can’t really get away from road side advertising for now. Public sporting events are completely infected, and for the ads I am forced to see I try to make a conscious effort not to buy their goods or services. I won’t subscribe to a streaming service if they have a sub+ad tier, if they’re separate free with ads or sub no ads I’ll support it.
Not really for any moral stance, but ad blockers are good at avoiding malware and some services are basically broken if you have to wait for an ad network, and I just feel mentally healthier in general without the extra propaganda.
Billboards / outdoor ads: Yeah, you’re out of luck. Best you can do is ignore them and look out for any ballot initiatives that would seek to remove them (rare, but possible). I’ve vowed never to buy anything from any company that advertises on those obnoxious mobile LED billboards.
Sporting Events: Similarly out of luck. Lucky for me, I can avoid those entirely. Depending on where you go, a lot of those are local businesses, so I’m less offended by them (I try to buy local when possible/practical).
Streaming services: This is a moral grey area, but my conscience is clean. I subscribe to whichever service(s) has what I want to watch but just pirate the shows. That’s less about avoiding ads and more about having a better experience. e.g. less crappy apps that often shoehorn in ads, having to use multiple websites with crappy players / buffering, players that won’t work on Linux, etc. Like you, I will only subscribe to ad-free tiers.
For general browsing on my PC: uBlock Origin is a standard on all my browsers with PiHole as a fallback.
On my phone: I’ve got a rooted device which lets me install AdAway (host file based ad block kind of like PiHole). For my other device that I don’t have rooted, I keep my VPN running and route DNS to my PiHole at home.
Any other ad, I basically just tune it out.