To me, ad blockers are a sign the web is working. Ethics comes up a bit when it comes to ad blockers. Sites make money from ads. Dont' they have a right to?..

To me, ad blockers are a sign the web is working. Ethics comes up a bit when it comes to ad blockers. Sites make money from ads. Dont' they have a right to?.. I think if we're going to think about it in that sort of way, we need to sort out rights. The web means that servers can serve whatever they want. They have a "right" to send you pictures of clowns when you request their page, even if that page was a news site yesterday. They can also send you ads. The client has the "right" to do whatever they want with that page. They can use whichever browser they want. Display the content however they want using whatever software they want. They can read the code, execute the JS, selectively display the content.... That's the deal. Servers can send what they want. Clients can do whatever they want with whatever servers send them. Users are exercising their rights with adblockers. On the more practical side, it's interesting how the economics of this has evolved. In the beginning, online ads were pretty useless and worthless. The economic model around online ads collapsed with the 99 crash. Then Google (or really omniture) figured out how online ads could work. They cleverly used it to serve ads with a tiny, unobtrusive footprint and still make way more money than the dancing monkey ads from the 90s. We've been in rapid growth mode since, and the value of advertising stock is now through the roof. Now that online ads are valuable again, the incentives to go overboard are overwhelming. Even Google who made small and unobtrusive ads a core idea have crossed some big lines. They look at valuable search queries like "best divorce lawyer in Toronto" where every click is worth $50, all the clicks going to those worthless (free) organic results and aggressively trying to increase the share of clicks going to ads. Now, even if you search for a divorce lawyer by name, you will first scroll throught a page and a half (on mobile) of his competitors ads. This is unequivocally "obtrusive" in the sense that it puts less relevant content in more prominence than the relevant stuff. This time it's being driven by ads being valuable rather than worthless. Back to the rights thing... Ad blockers and the active right of users to reject certain content is a balancing force here. When a respectable news site, forces you through an ad before they load a page, autoplay a video and then pop up (or under) an affiliate link to aliexpress and dating for gold digger pages...