I share the dislike of and militancy against ads evinced by some of the posts here. I started reading the piece thinking "Oh, another marketing guy who's drunk

I share the dislike of and militancy against ads evinced by some of the posts here. I started reading the piece thinking "Oh, another marketing guy who's drunk the 'relevant ads are good for people and everyone apart from a few contrarians really likes them' kool-aid. So I was surprised to read what seems to be a rare example of sane thinking in an advertising person: The truth is: we don’t care if our users use ad blockers on Stack Overflow. More accurately: we hope that they won’t, but we understand that some people just don’t like ads. Our belief is that if someone doesn’t like them, and they won’t click on them, any impressions served to them will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads to people who won’t click on them harms campaign performance. Yes! I will never click on an ad that somehow gets past my ad-blocking stuff, it is just a big fat waste of money serving me the ad that I will never click on. Isn't it a bigger waste of money, though, serving me the page that will never monetize because I will never click on the ads? Let's assume that the only reason for the existence of the site is to make money. Then by blocking ads, I'm signaling my intent to frustrate this purpose. Shouldn't the site just not serve me any pages at all since my intent is clear? Interestingly, the site-owner's view of the intrinsic (i.e. non-monetary) value of their site figures into this calculation, it seems. If the site is (at one extreme) disposable click-bait with no substantial content that can't be found at a dozen similar sites, then it's a reasonable assumption that if you disable access for ad-blocking users, they'll just go and get their meaningless content elsewhere rather than enable ads. Since their ad-blocking ways are a good indicator that even if they enabled ads for whatever reason, they'd probably never click on the ads anyhow, it makes economic sense in this case to just dispense with the users. At the other extreme, if your site is (let's say) a premier source of useful information in some sizable field, it's a good bet that if you force ad-blocking users to enable ads they will often continue to visit your site, either participating in an ad-blocking arms-race that makes it increasingly expensive for you to circumvent the blocking, or capitulating by loading the ads but just never, ever, clicking on them, costing you more money either way. So even from a purely financial POV, the strategy of just not caring about ad-blocking looks like a win, without having to invoke the nobler-but-woolier considerations about wanting to "make the world a better place for developers." Other ad-ops people in charge of intrinsically valuable web estate would do well to follow SO's thinking, IMO!