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You stopped leeching their bandwidth without any opportunity for them to earn any ad revenue from them!
Allowing leeches on your website doesn't seem that beneficial.
I stopped adding comments, starting discussions, I allow some non-intrusive ads when I enable them, I have quite extensive whitelist in ublock.
The end user cannot see some content on site A because of adblock detection but he can see it on site B, he down votes the link of site A on sharing networks, he asks for a policy banning or advocates against linking to site A because content can be found on B.
I've seen this play out many times, and at that point you're not just losing traffic from ad block clients you're losing traffic overall, have people actively promote your competitors and earn a bad rep (and that rep might not even be objective - in general if people remember anything it will be "don't use A" not the "why" of it)
Is it what you call a leech ?
I'm not convinced that's the case. They're usually quite different demographics.
Likewise I have the right to reject you if you can't comply with my terms.
In this case, I see internet content divided in half -- content for those who can pay for it, and content for those who can't. Not all websites should survive. Not all users should be able to experience everything on the internet. "You get what you pay for" is not wrong. Exclusivity can lead to quality.
"This site is not supported on browsers that block ads. Please switch to a different browser or disable your adblocker to proceed"
Those are terms. You can choose to ignore or circumvent them but they're still terms.
But underlying point is that you have no moral or ethical claim to how people view your content, just as you have no moral or ethical claim that a person cannot rip ads out of a magazine. If you want them to pay for your content, the Open Internet is not the place you should be publishing.
HTTP is not a contract.
Actually it feels like there are more people creating content than reading it these days. There is plenty of interesting content out there, so if people can't access something, they just move on to the next one and never return.
Getting past ad-blockers isn't exactly rocket science. This is an arms race which will not end well.
Either advertisers get to track people or they don't. Either people get to block things or they don't. Once upon a time there was little attention to these things, and advertisers got to slurp up data en masse. That is still the case, just an inch less so today.
Perhaps this is a bit cruel, but I believe in a divided web experience, one which is ad-supported and the masses browse and are tracked, the other which is curated, high signal, and directly paid for. Like with most things in life, you get what you have the leverage to get, and in general that means what you pay for.
Scientific literature is run through this way, and I don't think they're hurting for ad revenue. I think exclusivity can protect quality. It's okay to have a paid-for news channel, and a free news channel for the masses, a paid-for Reddit, and a free Reddit. You get what you pay for.
If the usage of ad blockers increases, you can bet that those not using ad blockers will be squeezed and exploited and have a thousand popups and intrusive ads thrown at them in order for the sites to recoup the lost money.
So those using ad blockers are making the web worse for everyone.
They are doing that already, they are maximizing the amount of ads they can shove down user's throats. This is nothing new and ad-blocking didn't change that. You'd think adverstiser would understand by now the reason why people use adblocker...
How is it making the web worse for people using adblockers? Because they are a subset of "everyone"
You're assuming that 'good behavior' of users should somehow stay the hand of marketing companies. It ought not. A good marketing company will do everything to extract full value insofar as it is harmonious to business goals -- ad blocker or not, the search for the perfect recipe of ad delivery will march on.
Your move.
That's one data point that can give you an idea of what the general reaction was.
Let's find some more: