
Why is there a debate about ad blockers at all? - hardwaresofton
http://vadosware.com/2015/10/04/why-is-there-a-debate-about-ad-blockers-at-all/
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Sfi81
Follow the money.. All $150 billion of it (1)

The reason you see a lot of opinion pieces against ad blocking in mainstream
press and blogs is because their main income stream comes digital advertising
and either changing business model to paid content or negating ad blocking
will take a lot of effort and expense.

There's literally hundreds of thousands of people in the journalism and ad
industry who's ability to put bread on the table is put at risk and Apple's
support for ad blocking threatens to tips the scale of blocking use. Naturally
there is every incentive to expend journalistic and PR efforts to protect
their income stream. Much like the music industry did in Napster days before
iTunes.

It has very little to do with rights and morals and the like. I'd be surprised
if most of the tech savvy writers writing these pieces don't use ad blocking
themselves personally.

1\. [http://www.statista.com/statistics/237974/online-
advertising...](http://www.statista.com/statistics/237974/online-advertising-
spending-worldwide/)

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declan
I just wrote this about how we're handling ad blocking with our news
recommendation engine startup and the iOS version of our news app:
[https://medium.com/@declanm/the-right-way-to-block-ads-on-
ne...](https://medium.com/@declanm/the-right-way-to-block-ads-on-news-
sites-3ee93d037210)

TLDR: We're enabling reader view, but not by default.

In terms of the linked article's prediction--"disable/enforce the removal of
ad blockers is...futile"\--I don't think that's the case. There already are
ad-blocker-blockers and probably ad-blocker-blockers soon too, if they don't
already exist. This arms race is only now starting in earnest.

One possibility is you'll see news organizations rely more on sponsored
content for revenue, with disclaimers about sponsorship only in the fine
print. Offhand I believe Wired, Buzzfeed, VentureBeat, TechRadar,
ReadWriteWeb, and Android Authority run sponsored content already; even The
Atlantic did, though there was a fuss about it.

More broadly, think of it as a piracy problem: You probably don't care if <=5%
of your potential customers pirate your product--they're probably the folks
with the least disposable income anyway. Some people are probably still using
lynx to read news articles (not that there's anything wrong with that). But
you _do_ care very, very much if ad blocking becomes sufficiently mainstream
that 50% of your users are "pirates."

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hugh4
Why do you think there's a debate? Because they're in the interests of some
people, and they're against the interests of others.

Once something is in someone's interest, they will always, _always_ manage to
dream up a moral justification for it.

~~~
sigmondo
Ads like magazine ads are fine.

Targeted ads and video and audio are not fine.

So, best to block 'em. The debate is which/who to block.

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bediger4000
Yes, why? I get to choose the behavior of my property. My computer is my
property, even more than your idea is your "intellectual property". So, why
can't I block ads? Ads are all lies anyway.

