No, and you’re not obligated to look straight at web ads and spend time considering them. Both models depend on putting the ad out there so that a small percentage of viewers responds to them. When you’re using adblock, you are removing that possibility entirely.
Yes, you are participating on an exchange. The website only exists because of an exchange between consumers and content producers. The producers provide information in exchange for consumers bearing with advertisements. You, the consumer, are reneging on your part of the exchange.
If every consumer did what you did, the website would be unsustainable. This is all about being socially responsible. All you have to do is make a small sacrifice so that the current internet model works, but instead you use adblock and pride yourself on gaming the system that allows for the website you’re viewing to exist in the first place.
I agreed to no such exchange.
Not true. Lots of websites support themselves without using ads. It’s one possible business model, and one that will hopefully become less prevalent as it becomes less lucrative. It’s already to the point where you can’t make significant income unless you’re the size of Facebook, Google, or 4chan. But this is not the fault of adblocking, which is not at all prevalent. Pretty soon even they’ll have to move on to new business models. And good riddance to advertising, I say.
It is not socially responsible to make money by lying to people. Advertisements are lies. The ethical considerations need to start there. Advertisers are the ones gaming the system. I’m just trying to defend myself.
It doesn’t matter whether you specifically agreed to it. By consuming their content, which was funded through advertising revenue, you are participating in a compact. Your part of the compact is to view advertisements, and you are shirking that.
A good analogy, I think, is whether it’s moral to siphon electricity from the grid without paying for it. You never signed any agreement that said you had to pay for it, so why should it be immoral? Obviously, though, it is.
I dislike this attitude that people have a right to game the advertising revenue system and that the burden is on the companies to find a way to make things work without it. It’s reckless and selfish. How do you know a website like the Onion, Salon, etc. could survive on a subscription model?
If you prefer that business model, maybe you could email the websites and ask if you could donate $5 through Paypal in exchange for blocking their ads.
I prefer to keep my work and leisure activities separate, therefore I only view this message board using an app on my Android tablet. The app I use is AFAIK the only one compatible with this board. The app displays no advertisements.
Question for you then… am I being “reckless and selfish”, or are the creators of the app?
By the way, although I understand those who do, I personally have no objection to advertisements on web sites. I find them unobtrusive enough not to use ad blockers and have (albeit rarely), clicked on them.
That is a terrible analogy. I already paid for my bandwidth. I am stealing nothing. I simply take some of the information they freely offered to me and filter out the information I don’t want.
The web is a public place. A more apt analogy would be walking through a public business and not looking at the advertising posters on their wall. Can I browse books at Barnes & Noble without staring at posters of the upcoming James Patterson novel? Or am I stealing their electricity by doing that? If I go to the bar but ignore the Budweiser signs, am I “breaking the implied contract” with the bar owner?
Would it make a difference if instead of ignoring them, I had a pair of glasses which blocked those images from my vision? Why? In both cases I’m simply filtering out unwanted information.
To the 9 people who think adblockers on the web are immoral, is fast forwarding through commercials with your DVR just as bad? Worse? Better? Why?
And that is exactly what I am doing. You don’t seem to have a very good grasp on how the web, or web advertisements, work. Ads are not served from the web page themselves. Instead, the page you visit redirects your browser to the ad company’s webpage, who then serves you the ad.
It is not the SMDB or the Onion or whatever else that is serving malware, it is the ad company’s webservers.
So by ad-blocking, I am doing exactly what you say I should do–ad company webservers have served malware to me in the past and I find them too untrustworthy, so I have instructed my browser not to allow connections to them.
Ad blocking did not come about because people are horribly opposed to advertising in any way, shape or form (sure, some are, but they are a tiny minority). It came about because ads are largely some combination of dangerous and obnoxious. The solution, for content providers who wish to be ad-supported, is not to make up some bogus morality argument about ad blocking, but to make sure that ads are something we want to see, or at least not something we’re going to go find an add-on to install to block.
That’s not what I’m saying you should do. I’m saying that if a website’s ads give you viruses, you should not type the site’s url into your browser.
In my 15+ years of internet browsing, sans adblock, using several browsers, my computer has never been seriously hurt by viruses from ads, if it has at all. I’ve never heard of anyone getting viruses from ads for legit websites. Based on conversations I’ve had with others, the most common reason for using adblock is having to sit through 15 second commercials before Youtube videos and such.
The information isn’t freely offered to you. It’s offered to you in exchange for the ads showing up on your computer screen.
Maybe we could help each other come up with better analogies. Barnes and Noble doesn’t operate based on money from selling ads in its stores. It gets its money by selling books. Bars don’t get most of their revenue from Budweiser signs (although they might get a little). They get their money from the three bucks you hand the bartender when you buy a Budweiser. The Onion AV Club, Youtube, and thousands of other websites make money only with ad revenue.
Let me offer a broader illustration here. We all benefit from the current dominant internet model in which ad revenue pays for content. The lives of everyone reading this have been enriched with information made possible by this model. If you are using adblock, you are tearing the model down.
Since this model has given something to all of us, we have a duty to maintain it. Especially, let me say again, since the sacrifice we’re asked for is very, very small.
This is true of many business models. I named several. Business models have no right to be sustainable.
It’s not immoral, but it’s self defeating to an extent. It costs money to provide content. If enough people hamper the revenue stream, the content will eventually disappear, downgrade, or be put behind some kind of pay wall. Obviously it doesn’t matter if there’s no direct link, for example, watching a TV show live doesn’t help it stay on the air if you don’t have a Neilson box. There’s no obligation on your part to support them, but it is to your own self interest.
I think they’ve just led sheltered lives. Pfft, come over here, and I’ll show them immoral, heh.
I think it is actually more moral to block ads than not to. The ad industry deliberately bothers all of us to get our attention, and typically lies (or at least tries to mislead) when they do give us information. Letting advertisers pay for valuable services just encourages that model.
If you can pay instead of having ads, I think you should. I do. If most people did ads would go away and the things we like online and in television and print and so forth would survive and get better.
And that is bad for the content provider. If I visit a site and block ads, the site is aware there is interest in their content, but their attempts to monetize it are flawed, which is something they can work to fix if they wish. If I do not visit a site, they have no idea if it is because I have a problem with the content or what.
Then you’re way to oblivious to be as involved in this conversation as you are. (again, it’s been a consistent problem on this very board)
Quote from
“Advertisements are 182 as times likely to deliver malicious content than pornography.”
15 seconds? On systems where I don’t have Youtube adblocked, I tend to get more 3-5 minute ads than I get 15 second ads. Interestingly, it’s on my Android tablet that I get the worst of them–and Google doesn’t allow people to easily install adblock software there, not without more effort than I currently want to bother with. Might be coincidence, but I have a suspicion that if you’re only ever getting 15 second ads, that might be because they may well serve ads differently where ad block is just a click away, and your wanted world where nobody uses it would lead more to a web of never-ending full-volume 5-minute “Punch the Monkey” ads everywhere.
Every time I’ve reinstalled my browser, I tend to leave the adblockers off for a while. Inevitably, some ads become sufficiently irritating that I find myself reinstalling them.
And here’s the thing - I’m incredibly tolerant of being advertised to. Not only am I tolerant of being advertised to, I actually like being advertised to, so long as it’s not irritating. I like giving marketers all kinds of information about what I like and what I buy. I don’t like to keep my habits secret. I’m the most damn cooperative customer you can think of as long as I’m not actively inconvenienced by your advertising and your attempts to gather information.
And yet, eventually I wind up using an adblocker, because the ads simply irritate me too much. Ads that pop up in front of what I’m looking at, ads that make pages harder to read by shifting the layout…they actively drive me away.
Hell, the same thing happens on TV sometimes. I don’t watch much TV. What I do watch is recorded on a DVR. And you know what? I don’t fast-forward through the commercials when I first start watching a show. But I’ve noticed something about them…the later in the show it gets, it seems like commercials get longer and come more often. And at that point, I start fast-forwarding through them. Maybe I’m wrong and this is just my perception, but whatever the case they are losing my eyeballs once I get too annoyed with too many ads breaking up what I’m watching.
Maybe the ads really are more successful this way, with the majority of the people. I have to assume these companies must know what they’re doing to some degree, or they wouldn’t continue to be around and successful; they can’t be throwing money at ad campaigns that are completely useless. But I can say for certain they aren’t successful with me, because they grow annoying.
Odd. It was on this board that I saw the first argument that Adblock was immoral. Yet no one agrees. I’m glad, because it isn’t, but still.
As for just avoiding that one video provider? Everyone on the Net uses them who can’t use YouTube due to it’s blocking of fair use. I can’t avoid the site. And why would I, anyways? Using their site costs them money that they don’t get with adblock. (If I care, I can even get around the wait.) It is in my best interest to make this decision either cost them money or at best come out even, so that other sites don’t do the same thing. The more I can deprive them of revenue, the better. I won’t even help people I ordinarily would. Luckily most of them have donation buttons to get around paying Blip, and I can give them like 250 views with a dollar anyways.
Linkara came out pleading for views while all the above went on, after making a bunch of pleas on his page claiming adblocking him was immoral, calling us all jerks. He I finally decided I could go without, as his show is very, very stale because he won’t innovate. He’s just pulling the RIAA thing and blaming one group for his lower views rather than improving his product.
It didn’t help that I wanted to punch him in the face every time I saw him, either. He claims that he wants capitalism, but then tries to shame people for being capitalistic. I mean, I stopped viewing ads on one of his shows because he said that he absolutely didn’t want charity. Well, giving money when you don’t have to is charity.
Sorry I went on about that, but I’ve wanted to talk about it here but was afraid to bring it up, as I thought this place would be on his side.
BTW, yes, all the information is offered for free, or you wouldn’t still be able to get it if you didn’t see the ads. It’s not like that’s hard to do, as places show by trying to shame you. (Fark.com is in on it now, which meant I adblocked the banner and swore I’d never pay them. I’m opposed to using shame to motivate, period.) Ads are a donation, and are much more annoying than the amount of money you provide. They are also about manipulating people into doing things they wouldn’t otherwise. Ads work even when we think they don’t, so I’m actually giving up some of my autonomy just for at most a few cents. The bargain isn’t worth it in most cases.
I’ve actually began doing one other thing since the Blip thing started: I’ve actually started watching ads on YouTube. I’m actually sacrificing that little bit of autonomy to make a statement. I’ve even promised that, if you’ll come out against Blip, I’ll unadblock you. No offers so far–no one who makes money by them will come out against their shame bullying. (And it is bullying, because you actually get punished for not viewing ads.)
No, it isn’t. If it were, it would not be possible to view the content without the ads. The actual model is that they give you the content for free and then hope you will give a donation by watching the ads. Some sites will additionally try to shame you into paying.
I’ve lost online friends over the Blip thing. You’re not going to make me feel guilty like you are trying. Shaming people for monetary gain is immoral. Manipulating fans like yourself to try and do it for them is even worse.
What makes you think I give a shit about what’s legal? As I’ve said repeatedly, if the law and my morality disagree, I choose the latter. I’ve also explained how the immoralities of our legal system have led me to the position that I will break any law I can reasonably get away with that isn’t immoral.
So, even if the EULA says I can’t, I use my computer the way I want to. I’ve always run No-CD cracks, because that’s the point of having a hard drive. I will download a DRM copy of any game I get on Steam or any other DRM service, if I need to to run mods.
I will jailbreak even when it becomes illegal (it isn’t right now due to the DOJ making an exception). The only right to control that copyright owners have is to keep you from selling or giving away their content while you still own it. Anything else, whether legal or not, I choose not to participate. To do so would be immoral.