It's the same as taking the free newspapers in your area, cutting out all the advertisements, and giving those out to people. Every person that gets the paper without the advertisements affects the newspaper bottom line. It affects it in a small way, but all together they add up. The newspaper functions because advertisers pay them, and if there's no reason for advertisers to expect their ads are seen, then there's no reason to continue paying.
Newspaper ads don't animate and distract me from what I'm reading. When I flip to a different page in the paper I don't have to "wait ten seconds" to start reading. I've never had an ad spontaneously appear in front of the newspaper article I'm reading.
Newspaper ads don't track me, and no matter how sketchy the ad is, it doesn't put me a couple of clicks away from installing malware on my computer.
I understand many people do not see this as a contract between the consumer and the content provider. I just haven't heard a justification for why it's not that I can agree with. To me, it clearly is.
What you've just described is me, taking the content from your site, stripping out the ads, and re-posting it on the Internet for others to consume sans advertisements. This is very clearly different from a single person using ad blockers on their own computers, and you know it.
However, this is equivalent to everyone who reads you newspaper cutting out the ads from their own newspaper before reading it. Which, perhaps, should tell you something about the ads in your paper.
Of course, the collective actions do degrade quality. It's classical 'Tragedy of the commons' [1].
True, it is bad for the advertiser and the ad hosting site. But it is good for the person annoyed by the ads. There is no objective value in blocking ads, it depends on the party. Since there is no objective valuation, it is not bad manners; it is merely an ability of consumers that is undesirable to advertisers and the ad hosting companies.
> It's the same as taking the free newspapers in your area, cutting out all the advertisements, and giving those out to people.
Nice try at an analogy, but removing the ads from free newspapers and giving the results to people could be seen as conspiracy harming the newspaper, because there would be party doing the removing and taking over the distribution. With online ads, nothing of this sort happens, because the consumer requests the newspaper company - not some other ad-removing party - for the newspaper article, the newspaper company sends it to him with hope he will pay attention to ads and the consumer displays only that part of the sent document which he deems worthy of his attention. He does this with help of his computer in which he is entitled to process and filter information in any way he deems useful. No organized action destroying the business is happening, the consumer himself removes the part he does not want on his computer, he does not remove ads for other people. This is virtually the same as when the person buys a newspaper in store and skips reading the ads, which everybody who would read the newspaper is entitled to do. All people are entitled to filter the information other people, companies and government try to feed them, irrespective of the channel, be it paper, audiovisual channels or the Internet. Otherwise our brains would get really dumb from all the fatuous ads.
If you're telling me that disabling ads is bad manners then I put it to you that attempting to deceive the advertisers about the value of their ads is also bad manners. In fact I'm starting to wonder if it isn't my moral obligation to block adverts in order to help advertisers save money they would have otherwise wasted.
I don't see this as any different than if you were at a conference, and someone offered you a free book which you were interested in if you talked to them for thirty seconds about their product. Taking the book without hearing the pitch is not what I would consider acceptable behavior.
In all cases, it should be obvious that if you desire something (in this case, content), but are unwilling to pay the cost (in this case, viewing advertising), then the correct response is to not take the content.
Some people have made arguments about how intrusive some the the advertisement tracking is as a justification for blocking it. This is a perfectly acceptable justification for blocking that tracking, but it does nothing to address the further consumption of the content. The correct response to the abusive shopkeeper that berates you in line is not to steal his goods, but to leave the goods and refuse to give him your business.
> If you're telling me that disabling ads is bad manners then I put it to you that attempting to deceive the advertisers about the value of their ads is also bad manners.
How are you helping this issue by making it harder to tell which users are viewing advertising and which are not? In any case, the market decides this. You are just making information in the market harder to come by, making the market less efficient.
> In fact I'm starting to wonder if it isn't my moral obligation to block adverts in order to help advertisers save money that would otherwise be wasted.
Forgive me if that sounds a bit like a rationalization of your current behavior after the fact.
If you can't find a business model that doesn't antagonize me, then you haven't found a business model that I care to support. If capitalism is failing to provide us with even basic methods of producing quality works, then that's a problem we should tackle at a larger scale.
No, it's more like asking the newspaper publisher if you can have a version of their newspaper (for your own use) without ads, and them obliging. Blocking ads has nothing to do with redistributing someone else's content.
You're right, it's like subscribing to a service that does it for you.
> No, it's more like asking the newspaper publisher if you can have a version of their newspaper (for your own use) without ads, and them obliging.
No, if they had an easy way to enforce your viewing of ads that scaled, I think it's fairly obvious they would (as many of the blocked ads are indeed an attempt at this, such as the timed overlay). It's more like the distributor responding with both marketing material and content with the understanding you are to view the marketing material along with the content, and you routing the marketing material to the trash from the post office (or somehow tricking the system into not sending you the marketing material). The expectation you are to view the marketing material is still there, even if you've somehow removed your ability to receive it.
