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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 t

by 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).

by john_b 13y ago

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).