W3C_annual_most_used_survey_blocklist/README.md

                                                         SOURCES
This is a minimial blocklist based on the W3Tech annual surveys on most used webtechnology. In stead of crawling the web analyzing
Alexa's TOP 500.000 websites, I looked at the web industry itself, to block the bulk of the mainstream advertising services with the 
obvious benefit of low maintenance effort (for me) and low performance impact (for the adblocker you are using).

                                               WHY USE A MINIMAL BLOCKLIST?                                        
In advertising the number one (Google) has a marketshare of around 40 percent, Facebook the number two hits the 20 percent mark
while the number three Comscore just has a little over 2.5% marketshare. For comparison Amazon with its huge webstore generates
about the same advertising traffic on its own website. 

Number 200 on this list only has a marginal market share of 0.1 % 1n the Alexa top 10000. Imagine how effective URL number 50.000 will
be of your blocklist. Fair chance it will never be triggered, because you never surf to the websites on which this tracker is used. 
Some adblock extensions have an option to exclude URL's with low usage (like AdGuard or SmartAdblock) or periodically filter out dead
URL's (like Opera's and Brave's build-in adblockers claim to do). 

Opera performed an analysis on the effectiveness of Easylist and reported in a blog that 20 percent of the listed URLs were dead and
another 60% had a 'hit rate' of less than 1% of all the traffic of the Opera browser users (having agreed to provide telemetry data). 
Scientific studies also showed that large blocklist adblockers (AdBlockPlus and uBlock0rigin) were a little more effective for websites
not in Alexa top 500.000 (with more than 2000 unique visitors per day), but a little less effective on Alexa top top 300000 (websites 
with more than 3000+ visitors per day), compared with small blocklist adblockers (Ghostery and Privacy Possum). Websites with many 
visitors are more likely to install adblock walls to protect advertising income. Anti-adblock walls often check for popular content
filters, making it more likely to run into a adblock wall with for instance Easylist, see https://browserleaks.com/proxy 

                                                      ALTERNATIVES
When you want a common use well maintained small blocklist, use Disconnect's Simple Ad-filter or Peter Low's blocklist (both have over
3000 blacklisted URL's). Disconnect filter is also used by Firefox and Edge anti-tracking. When you want a well maintained medium sized 
blocklist, use Steven Black's blocklist (more than 50.000 URL's blacklisted). When you want a large blocklist have a look at the 
'ultimate' blocklist of Energized.pro (over 700K URL's blacklisted). Benefit of Energized is that they rempve dead URL's. 

                                                    ERRORS & ISSUES
When you still want to use this blocklist, feel free to use it and provide feedback on errors. You can post issues, but I will only have 
a look at it when the issue causes a problem on an COM, INF, NET or ORG domain. You can fix a problem easily yourself in most adblock 
extensions (e.g. AdBlockPlus, Adguard, uBlockOrigin). Look for UserFilter or MyFilter in the extension options. For instance when this 
filter causes a problem on website ABC_example.com, simply add a badfilter using this syntax: 

||ABC_example.com$badfilter