The Morality of Web Advertisement Blocking

An anonymous reader writes "There has been some recent coverage of the over-hyped boycott of Firefox, in response to the rising popularity of the Adblock Plus Firefox extension. A recent editorial on CNET looks into the issue, and explores the moral and legal issues involved in client-side web advertisement blocking. Whereas TiVo users freeload on the relatively fixed broadcasting costs paid by TV networks, users of web ad-blocking technology are actively denying website owners revenue that would otherwise go to pay for the bandwidth costs of serving up those web pages. If the website designer has to pay for bits each time you view their website without viewing their banner ads, are you engaged in theft? Is this right? "

Re:A non-issue ...

[truesaer]

I fail to see how using Firefox to ignore the ad banners and such is morally any different than throwing out the advertising supplements to the newspaper without glancing at the ads therein.

You didn't even read the slashdot summary, much less the article obviously. The newspaper gets paid for including the ad, not for you viewing it. Websites often get paid by impressions, so if the ads aren't received by the customers then the revenue isn't received by the site. Totally different from the newspaper, who gets an "impression" with every paper sold guaranteed.

Still not necessarily wrong given how parasitic a lot of ads are now, hogging resources and making annoying sounds. But lets focus on the actual argument raised in TFA.

Re:There will come a breaking point....

[amuro98]

No, Tivo does not remove ads. You can FF through them, you can enable a backdoor giving you a 30-sec skip button, but Tivo does not automatically skip over ads like the Replay did. Perhaps you're thinking of MythTV?

As for press releases and ads thinly disguised as content, we already have that NOW - AND they still use ADS. Have you looked at many magazines lately? Most of them are owned by the company whose products they write about - glowingly I might add. Why take out an ad when you can pretend to be "legitimate" media and pay someone to toot your own horn? And as a bonus, you now have a quote from a "real" journalist to use in your other advertising collateral! It's win-win!

Meanwhile, other sources of information, such as blogs, usenet and other boards are still good sources for information that's relatively free of bias and ads (spammers, trolls and fanboys, on the other hand...well, they're easily filtered.)

Then there's Consumer Reports, which is supported solely by its supporters, and accepts ZERO ads or money from any company.

So, no, we don't have to compromise on anything.

Re:Oh boo hoo

[SatanicPuppy]

It's not just about "offensive" ads...It's ads that slow down your goddamn page loads, because the page waits for the massively overloaded ad server to finish loading its ad before the rest of the content pops up. Screw that.

I block ads from most big banner providers because I hate them. For sites that depend on that revenue I tend to buy their stuff, or subscribe, or donate, or whatever.

For small providers or people who host their own ads? I don't block 'em. They're usually not as annoying to me as the interminable "Punch the Monkey to Win an XBox/iPod/Whore" ads and I don't mind giving them my business. Hell, to use an over-wrought example, look at Penny Arcade [penny-arcade.com]...They put thought into the ads they choose to host, and the ads are relevant and informative to the people who frequent their site.

adblock subscription

[SethJohnson]

I don't sift through every page and Adblock everything.

Check into AdBlock Plus subscriptions [mozilla.org]. You won't have to sift through any pages. The ads will be blocked automagically. That's what this discussion is mostly about.

Seth

definitions

[Tom]

If the website designer has to pay for bits each time you view their website without viewing their banner ads, are you engaged in theft? Is this right?

No, it is wrong.

Merriam-Webster:

theft:
1 a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it

Which means in order for it to be theft, it would have to meet the following requirements:
* It must be illegal
* It must be taking and removing of personal property
* It must be intended to deprive the rightful owner of said property

Blocking ads satisfies none of these requirements even remotely. So whatever you so, however much you dislike it, it is not theft.

And no, this is not nit-picking. Calling things by their proper terms is a requirement of a proper evaluation process.

Re:Oh boo hoo

[jessecurry]

If the web site operator doesn't want me to view the content for free, then they should not place it on the web in a public location.

By limiting which browsers are able to connect to their site and retrieve data they are(more or less) doing what you recommend. I take from your post that you support a website's right to limit your access?

Re:a better mantra

[Kimos]

Somebody should make a t-shirt with that.

Disregarding your sarcasm...
http://www.paulbeard.org/wordpress/index.php/archives/2005/04/11/your-wish-is-my-command/ [paulbeard.org]

Re:Oh boo hoo

[houstonbofh]

Considering that Yahoo served up a few million Trojans in poorly vetted ads, it is a damn sight more than an inconvenience! http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/11/yahoo_serves_12million_malware_ads/ [theregister.co.uk]

Re:Well you're half right.

[glittalogik]

Google Adwords is an advertising model that should have shown up years before it did. Small, non-flashy, to the point, not always 100% relevant to the surrounding content but generally pretty close. That, I can deal with.

Re:Well you're half right.

[Skreems]

This would probably get ignored as click-fraud, and if it happened often enough might get the page banned from the advertising service altogether.

Re:Well you're half right.

[Dun Malg]

Suppose someone puts up a booth on the street with Ice Cream, and little drop box with a sign that says "Please pay .25 for each ice cream bar you take". You're saying it's perfectly MORAL for you to come along and take all the ice cream (or as much as you want) and not pay him a dime because he didn't provide a means to enforce the sale?

You're an idiot. You either can't construct a valid metaphor, or think we're too stupid to see through your intentionally invalid one.

That's not how it works?

[FuzzyFox]

I was given to understand that this is exactly how AdBlock operates: Your browsers goes ahead and fetches the blocked content, it is simply not displayed.

In other words, the advertiser sees you downloaded the ad, but has no idea whether it shows up on your screen.

The best of both worlds.