Wow, this is a weird thread. Who is this guy and why is everyone so mad at him about making his living in ad tech..?
Him being in ads doesn't change the validity of the points he's making. Websites have to make money somehow. If you don't pay for a subscription, and don't allow the ads to run, why should you still feel entitled to consume their content?
To be super clear: I'm in the ad-blocker camp, but I don't think we can really pretend that it's somehow justified. Ads annoy the bejesus out of me, I'm not willing to pay for a million little one-off subscriptions, there's this lovely back door that gives me all the content with no ads, so, me being of low moral fiber, goes the adblocking route.
I have no problem with how he makes his living but when i wrote that he hadn't said a peep about it and it colors his arguments quite differently.
Now him making money from ads also doesn't give him the right to call someone a selfish asshole for not displaying them.
If a website wantsto block me for using an ad blocker that's fine by me, I leave the website no harm no foul.
But to act as if it's theft to view a page with adblocker on is just asinine, and he also did just that.
As others have said it's not just the ads, its the invasive tracking, resource hogging, auto playing videos et al. Ads have had their chance and pissed enough of us off that we said enough is enough.
We did not agree to be served an ad you jjst present it to us upon landing on your site. Ask away so we can deny but let's not for one second pretend any of us owe you our attention or our cpu just because we clicked some random link.
Yep and in all honesty it's their resource use (slowing down web pages), sometimes intrusiveness (e.g. modal popups), masquerading as news articles (those Taboola boxes), and cross-site user tracking/data sharing behavior that annoy me more than anything else.
If ads were just inline hyperlinked images I'd find them much less annoying, and would probably not bother blocking them if that is all they were.
