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Ad blockers are tools for theft. Do you avoid all websites that rely on advertising for all or part of their income or are you perfectly fine stealing their wo

Ad blockers are tools for theft. Do you avoid all websites that rely on advertising for all or part of their income or are you perfectly fine stealing their work/services by denying them the opportunity to make a little money during your visit? Alternatively, do you only use services for which you pay a fee? Which search engine do you use? Email? Social sites? Just trying to understand this position. Unless someone explicitly gives a product or service away (HN being a good example) the correct moral and ethical position is to not tamper with their revenue generation strategy or otherwise not use their product or service. Anything else is theft. Being annoyed does not entitle you or anyone else to steal. It doesn't magically make it OK.

pearjuice 13y ago
Stealing? Really? The content is free to consume by anyone, or it goes behind a pay wall in which case the user decides whether it is worth paying for. Advertisements ruin layouts, can often not be trusted and scream for your attention. I have the right to set up restrictions on which hosts my network adapter can connect to and I don't feel like wasting bandwidth on stuff I didn't ask for in the first place or does everything it takes to track my behaviour. I do use services for which I pay granted they are worth my money.
- robomartin 13y ago
  Yes stealing. Really! > The content is free to consume by anyone Utter nonsense. Opinions like these only come from people who don't understand business, have never run one and never risked their own capital, effort and health launching one. Nonsense. It's just like reading a physical newspaper without paying for it and, at the same time, having some kind of a machine that blacks out all of the advertising. Stealing. Plain and simple. Businesses cost money to run. Advertising is an age-old method to make money. And for some businesses that's the best way to support their operations. Look at Google [0]. It costs TEN BILLION DOLLARS TO RUN GOOGLE FOR JUST THREE MONTHS. TEN FUCKING BILLION. And you would use Google with an ad blocker? How dare you! Take it to an extreme: Starting tomorrow everyone in the world uses ad blockers. The internet would collapse overnight. Either pay for the service or allow the ads. Yes sir! You are stealing. [0] http://www.google.com/finance?fstype=ii&q=NASDAQ:GOOG http://www.google.com/finance?fstype=ii&q=NASDAQ:GOOG
  - drill_sarge 13y ago
    If everything is so horrible with ad blocking etc. get behind a fking paywall or stop crying. I am not exposing myself to possible malicious advertising networks, tracking and obnoxious, intrusive ads with sound and whatnot. deal with with it.
    - robomartin 13y ago
      Then don't use the websites that offend you by daring to offer a free service by using advertising to pay their salaries and overhead. Do you get paid for the work you do? Do you think others ought to get paid for their work? Well, if you don't like advertising don't steal their work product by using their sites through ad blockers. It really is a simple concept. All arguments to the contrary sound like a five year old kid crying "I don't care! I want it! I want it! I want it!".
  - john_b 13y ago
    > "Take it to an extreme: Starting tomorrow everyone in the world uses ad blockers. The internet would collapse overnight." The internet predates internet advertising. Many sites use different business models and are profitable without relying on ads. If everyone in the world used ad blockers, many websites would die, but if these websites actually provided a useful service, replacements would spring up using alternate business models because the internet is about as close to a free market as currently exists.
    - robomartin 13y ago
      Well, it is obvious that you guys will use any imaginable excuse to justify stealing services on the internet. You can create whatever mental construct you wish to create, the bottom line is that you are not paying for a service AND you are taking steps to deny the service provider from even having the potential to earn something by providing you with that service. It's pure hypocrisy. Plain and simple. There are people who will justify just about anything, including gassing innocent children. That's the nature of the world we live in. I am not equating the two at all. Simply stating that human beings are pretty good about justifying bad things they choose to do. As I have stated repeatedly, if you told me that you did not use any of these services that derive revenue from advertising I'd definitely hold you up as an example of taking the correct moral and ethical road. Saying that ads are annoying, look ugly or have potential security problems (bullshit) AND on top of it, still going to those sites to use their work product for free. Well, you are a thief.
john_b 13y ago
If you want to make the case that using ad blockers is akin to theft, you have to explain what the advertiser is deprived of when a person chooses not to view their ad. Sure, the advertiser is paying a website to put an ad on their page, but just because they paid to put it there doesn't entitle the advertiser to a certain amount of your attention. It may or may not be profitable to put it there, but the advertiser has no moral claim on anybody's time or attention as a result of their business model. The only reason this argument ever came about is because it's easy to measure who sees an ad on the internet, which is not the case for billboards, TV commercials, newspaper ads, and so on. Since the measurement was cheap and intuitively it made sense for advertisers to charge based on the number of people that see or click on an ad, they chose to pay website owners based on the fine grained statistics of the webpage rather than by assessing a priori the market value of an ad on a particular webpage for a particular length of time. The "theft" here is imaginary and entirely self-imposed by the business model of the advertiser. Especially when you consider that the demographic that uses adblockers probably wouldn't click on very many ads if they didn't use the adblockers. And whatever impression the mere presence of an advertisement would create might very well be a negative one to this demographic. The conceptual leap from "our business model requires ads to make money" and "some people don't want to view these ads" to "those people are stealing from us" is a syllogistic fallacy.
- robomartin 13y ago
  It's really funny to watch people who don't want to pay for anything run around in circles trying to justify their actions. The only morally and ethically correct behavior is NOT to visit sites with advertising. It isn't to use the sites and block their ads. It's as simple as that. Don't want ads? Don't use the service. Go pay for a service that will use your money to build a site without the ads that bug you so much.
  - john_b 13y ago
    > "Don't want ads? Don't use the service. Go pay for a service that will use your money to build a site without the ads that bug you so much." Where possible, I do exactly that. For example, I have a Netflix subscription, but don't watch regular TV. The reality is that many services are simply not offered in an ad-free model. Most people are ok with ad-supported services in exchange for not paying for them, so the business case for creating an ad-free version for the minority that isn't ok with ads doesn't always exist. But those who don't want to have their browsing experience polluted by distracting and space wasting ads for irrelevant products aren't suddenly going to change their minds because they're in the minority. Personally, I would be willing to pay a small monthly fee for an ad blocker (I did make a donation once) and have a portion of that distributed to website owners whose ads were blocked. It's probably not a very realistic scenario, but the bottom line is that an ad blocker is something that many people find useful and which some would be willing to pay for if there weren't ample free alternatives. The adblocker provides a service to me 100% of the time I visit a website with ads, whereas an ad is only useful to me if I find it relevant and choose to act on it (0.000001% of the time).

pearjuice 13y ago

Stealing? Really? The content is free to consume by anyone, or it goes behind a pay wall in which case the user decides whether it is worth paying for. Advertisements ruin layouts, can often not be trusted and scream for your attention. I have the right to set up restrictions on which hosts my network adapter can connect to and I don't feel like wasting bandwidth on stuff I didn't ask for in the first place or does everything it takes to track my behaviour. I do use services for which I pay granted they are worth my money.

robomartin 13y ago
Yes stealing. Really! > The content is free to consume by anyone Utter nonsense. Opinions like these only come from people who don't understand business, have never run one and never risked their own capital, effort and health launching one. Nonsense. It's just like reading a physical newspaper without paying for it and, at the same time, having some kind of a machine that blacks out all of the advertising. Stealing. Plain and simple. Businesses cost money to run. Advertising is an age-old method to make money. And for some businesses that's the best way to support their operations. Look at Google [0]. It costs TEN BILLION DOLLARS TO RUN GOOGLE FOR JUST THREE MONTHS. TEN FUCKING BILLION. And you would use Google with an ad blocker? How dare you! Take it to an extreme: Starting tomorrow everyone in the world uses ad blockers. The internet would collapse overnight. Either pay for the service or allow the ads. Yes sir! You are stealing. [0] http://www.google.com/finance?fstype=ii&q=NASDAQ:GOOG http://www.google.com/finance?fstype=ii&q=NASDAQ:GOOG
- drill_sarge 13y ago
  If everything is so horrible with ad blocking etc. get behind a fking paywall or stop crying. I am not exposing myself to possible malicious advertising networks, tracking and obnoxious, intrusive ads with sound and whatnot. deal with with it.
  - robomartin 13y ago
    Then don't use the websites that offend you by daring to offer a free service by using advertising to pay their salaries and overhead. Do you get paid for the work you do? Do you think others ought to get paid for their work? Well, if you don't like advertising don't steal their work product by using their sites through ad blockers. It really is a simple concept. All arguments to the contrary sound like a five year old kid crying "I don't care! I want it! I want it! I want it!".
- john_b 13y ago
  > "Take it to an extreme: Starting tomorrow everyone in the world uses ad blockers. The internet would collapse overnight." The internet predates internet advertising. Many sites use different business models and are profitable without relying on ads. If everyone in the world used ad blockers, many websites would die, but if these websites actually provided a useful service, replacements would spring up using alternate business models because the internet is about as close to a free market as currently exists.
  - robomartin 13y ago
    Well, it is obvious that you guys will use any imaginable excuse to justify stealing services on the internet. You can create whatever mental construct you wish to create, the bottom line is that you are not paying for a service AND you are taking steps to deny the service provider from even having the potential to earn something by providing you with that service. It's pure hypocrisy. Plain and simple. There are people who will justify just about anything, including gassing innocent children. That's the nature of the world we live in. I am not equating the two at all. Simply stating that human beings are pretty good about justifying bad things they choose to do. As I have stated repeatedly, if you told me that you did not use any of these services that derive revenue from advertising I'd definitely hold you up as an example of taking the correct moral and ethical road. Saying that ads are annoying, look ugly or have potential security problems (bullshit) AND on top of it, still going to those sites to use their work product for free. Well, you are a thief.

john_b 13y ago

If you want to make the case that using ad blockers is akin to theft, you have to explain what the advertiser is deprived of when a person chooses not to view their ad. Sure, the advertiser is paying a website to put an ad on their page, but just because they paid to put it there doesn't entitle the advertiser to a certain amount of your attention. It may or may not be profitable to put it there, but the advertiser has no moral claim on anybody's time or attention as a result of their business model. The only reason this argument ever came about is because it's easy to measure who sees an ad on the internet, which is not the case for billboards, TV commercials, newspaper ads, and so on. Since the measurement was cheap and intuitively it made sense for advertisers to charge based on the number of people that see or click on an ad, they chose to pay website owners based on the fine grained statistics of the webpage rather than by assessing a priori the market value of an ad on a particular webpage for a particular length of time. The "theft" here is imaginary and entirely self-imposed by the business model of the advertiser. Especially when you consider that the demographic that uses adblockers probably wouldn't click on very many ads if they didn't use the adblockers. And whatever impression the mere presence of an advertisement would create might very well be a negative one to this demographic. The conceptual leap from "our business model requires ads to make money" and "some people don't want to view these ads" to "those people are stealing from us" is a syllogistic fallacy.

robomartin 13y ago
It's really funny to watch people who don't want to pay for anything run around in circles trying to justify their actions. The only morally and ethically correct behavior is NOT to visit sites with advertising. It isn't to use the sites and block their ads. It's as simple as that. Don't want ads? Don't use the service. Go pay for a service that will use your money to build a site without the ads that bug you so much.
- john_b 13y ago
  > "Don't want ads? Don't use the service. Go pay for a service that will use your money to build a site without the ads that bug you so much." Where possible, I do exactly that. For example, I have a Netflix subscription, but don't watch regular TV. The reality is that many services are simply not offered in an ad-free model. Most people are ok with ad-supported services in exchange for not paying for them, so the business case for creating an ad-free version for the minority that isn't ok with ads doesn't always exist. But those who don't want to have their browsing experience polluted by distracting and space wasting ads for irrelevant products aren't suddenly going to change their minds because they're in the minority. Personally, I would be willing to pay a small monthly fee for an ad blocker (I did make a donation once) and have a portion of that distributed to website owners whose ads were blocked. It's probably not a very realistic scenario, but the bottom line is that an ad blocker is something that many people find useful and which some would be willing to pay for if there weren't ample free alternatives. The adblocker provides a service to me 100% of the time I visit a website with ads, whereas an ad is only useful to me if I find it relevant and choose to act on it (0.000001% of the time).