There's always someone with the tendency to skip actually trying to understand the comments they read and just pattern-match it to something else they've heard, so I'll say this up-front: In this comment, I'm not saying that ad-blocking is morally equivalent to shoplifting.
You're making some pretty radical assertions without any attempt to justify them, so I'll draw a bit of an analogy to show why I feel like I'm missing something.
I don't see why your comment wouldn't apply almost 100% the same to shoplifting. I know the usual distinction drawn is that the marginal costs are different, but I don't really see how that's relevant: there's a (low) marginal cost to serving each page that's being lost. And anyway, the idea that the marginal cost is all that matters is beyond bizarre to me. There's a reason you buy bubble gum for more than the retailer paid for it, and it's because you're not only defraying the cost of the bubble gum to him.
> If you push out content and you can't make money on it without ads, then that content didn't need to be created in the first place.
"If retailers can't make money on goods without charging money for it, then those goods didn't need to be createdd in the first place". What does the mode of monetization have to do with whether the goods "needed" to be created? Isn't continual consumption of a site's content a revealed preference that pretty much by definition means that they're getting value out of it?
> Ads, to me, represent a monetization strategy rooted in "I did something, and you're looking at, so I deserve to get paid" but that makes no sense. The disconnect here is the presumption that the content has any value to begin with. I think what scares traditional content-creators is the idea that the vast majority of content has no inherent value.
"Selling bubble gum, to me, represents a monetization strategy that says 'I made something, you want it, so I deserve to get paid' ". Again, I'm not seeing the difference in this case. The idea that something that many people choose to read has no value seems so obviously insanely wrong by definition that I must be misunderstanding you somehow.