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WaLLy3K, is more of a scorched-earth type. He
distinguished himself among Pi-hole fans by
curating huge block lists of domains associated
with ad servers, trackers, and malware. One of
the other devs took to calling him “Mr. Insane
Lists.” If you take all of WaLLy3K’s recommenda-
tions, you’ll ind yourself blocking about 2.6 mil-
lion domains. His objection to ads includes an
aversion to “visual clutter” as well as a desire for
privacy. He’s the kind of guy who will go up to a
photographer at an event and ask that she not
take his picture. “It comes down to consent,” he
says. “I didn’t consent to giving out this informa-
tion to people.” He estimates he spends 10 hours
to 15 hours a week on Pi-hole.
Along with Drobnak in Rochester, Salmela’s
other core comrades are Blayne Campbell in
Canada, Adam Warner in the U.K., and the
pseudonymous DL6ER in Germany. Together they put in
a lot of late nights, mostly focused on talking new Pi-hole
users through setup and the occasional bug. To support that
labor, donors provide $1,000 to $2,000 a month. Salmela
also collects an extra $20 to $100 a month through sales of
Pi-hole T-shirts, hoodies, and mugs, and about $20 to $30
through ailiate links on the Pi-hole website, which pay a
tiny commission when someone clicks on them.
This is obviously a pittance for a team of skilled
developers putting in serious hours. After a user survey
found that 69 percent thought Pi-hole was “worth pay-
ing for,” Salmela set up a one-time fundraiser asking for
$100,000. He says he’d need $160,000 to $180,000 a year to
truly support the project, including some full-time staf, but
he’s been shy about asking for donations. “If your product is
actually good, your consumers will sell it for you,” Salmela
said in an email. “We have paid $0 in marketing and adver-
tising, and look what we’ve grown into. It’s not easy and not
currently sustainable, but it’s the way it needs to be done.”
It’s common for Pi-hole users to screenshot their stats
(how many ads blocked, from where) and hold informal
competitions with one another. Some wear T-shirts and
drink from mugs emblazoned with replicas of the software’s
colorful graphs; at least one displays his stats on his internet-
connected mirror. “Get to see how many ads I’ve blocked
any time I look in the mirror now!” he wrote. (It was 227.)
Another asked the community how to set up an audio alert
every time an ad is blocked in real time. “Could be super
satisfying,” they wrote.
Pi-hole has attracted fans from mainstream tech compa-
nies such as Microsoft and AsusTek Computer Inc.—plus,
its developers believe, the occasional self-loathing adman.
In 2016 someone showed up in the team’s chat room with a
carrier pigeon avatar, a number of sophisticated technical
suggestions, and what sounded like inside information. “He
was like, ‘You know, this isn’t going unnoticed,’ ” Drobnak
says. “Or, ‘The advertising business, this is something that
concerns them.’ ” The carrier pigeon was active for about
two to three months, then disappeared.
The ad industry hasn’t taken any oicial shots at Pi-hole,
likely because setup remains a signiicant barrier, says Jeremy
Gillula, tech policy director at the nonprofit Electronic
Frontier Foundation. Yet some 30 percent of the inter-
net’s top 10,000 sites now use software designed to subvert
browser-level ad blocking. Publishers will target Salmela’s
software if it becomes anywhere near as popular as AdBlock
Plus, says Nicole Perrin, an analyst at researcher eMarketer.
Still, the popular support for Pi-hole and other ad block-
ers may signal changes. The scandal around Cambridge
Analytica, the political advertising irm that got hold of data
from as many as 87 million Facebook users and used the infor-
mation to inluence an election, shows that people still value
privacy more than Mark Zuckerberg long claimed. In April,
Democratic Senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut
and Ed Markey of Massachusetts introduced a bill that would
allow ad targeting only with users’ clear consent.
While the U.S. legislation has built little momentum so
far, the EU’s privacy law, which afects any company doing
business in Europe, is already changing the industry’s prac-
tices. The letter of the law requires publishers to get explicit
permission from users to share data with every party that’s
asking for data each time one of them makes a request. That
could mean clicking “OK” perhaps hundreds of times just
to get to one webpage, a status quo that would at least force
the consolidation of data collection and reduce the ad indus-
try’s data drain.
For publishers struggling to survive even with maximum
ad surveillance, the Pi-hole team recommends a renewed
focus on subscriptions, ailiate links, and curated endorse-
ments for products and services that might truly interest
users, similar to the way podcast hosts may talk about how
much they personally enjoy a sponsor’s products. There’s
nothing wrong with pitching people stuf they might enjoy,
the team says. It’s just the constant, ever-intensifying surveil-
lance that needs to stop.
PREVIOUS SPREAD, CLOUDS:GETTY IMAGES;THIS SPREAD,PHOTOGRAPHS BY MATTHEW HINTZ FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK
While working in a high school IT department, Salmela created Pi-hole over a summer