

Why ad blocking is not a moral dilemma  - tshtf
http://monogatari.doukut.su/2011/11/why-ad-blocking-is-not-moral-dilemma.html

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CJefferson
This seems like a very weak, self-justifying argument. For example, one of the
arguments given is: A user not interested in advertising has to "hurt" either
of the other two in the relationship.

It is clear to me that blocking advertising hurts the website author. At an
extreme, if everyone blocked all advertising, then there are a very large
number of websites which would run out of money and shut down in a very short
amount of time. Clearly they are using the funds generated by advertising to
stay afloat.

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dalke
Ad blockers have been around for a long time. Anyone who hasn't factored in
their existence into their business model has done poor planning. Companies
which depend on high ad view rates to stay in business have a tenuous model.

There's also more than one type of advertisement. I don't like the visual ones
with lots of movement, designed to attract my eye. If a site starts playing
audio I almost invariably shut the window or hit the mute button. I'm more
likely to get an ad blocker just to prevent that nuisance.

While a text advertisement, like what Google has, has less intrusion. So you
can see ad blockers as a vote against certain styles of advertisement, and not
against all advertisement. The question then is how to balance the needs of
three different people (readers, writers, and advertisers).

Finally, there's a bug in Safari on the Mac. If Flash crashes then I have to
restart the browser in order to get it working again. I actually use it as a
sort of ad blocker; when I want to see something Flash-based I pop over to
Firefox and reopen that page. It's even better in that detection scripts think
that Flash is present, so don't give me fallback information.

Given that advertisements use Flash to display the ads, is it immoral for me
to not restart my browser each time Flash crashes, just to see ads?

~~~
CJefferson
If you like flash ads, or if websites which rely on ads have a dubious
business model, or blocking different types of ads, or flash crashing, does
not (in my opinion) alter if not ad blocking is a moral issue.

Of course, all those issues can be discussed. I personally ad-block, because I
have decided it improves my life greatly, and I have decided I don't care
about websites which I like which don't offer me an alternative way to support
them.

