A program that labels itself as an "ad blocker" yet allows, by default, ads from companies who pay money, is part of the dark side.
Simply put, many people believe there is no such thing as an acceptable ad on the web, and that any ad blocker which allows advertising to be shown is by definition malicious, broken software. No advertising, anywhere, at any time, under any circumstances, regardless of the content, or how badly a site depends on it, is acceptable to users of ad blockers. They expect it to block ads, period.
I'm a user of an ad blocker (ABP). Don't put words in my mouth.
I believe in compensating creators for their content and would rather compensate them with my time than my money.
Don't lump everyone into your political agenda.
I'm certainly in the "fuck all ads forever" camp. There are just way too many downsides to downloading/seeing/playing/executing advertisements. If all the websites that relied on ads today had to disappear or redesign to reduce their operational costs, I think the web would be a much better place.
Except it wouldnt. Only state-sponsored media and paywalls would exist, which won't be fun.
I hear this a lot but there was just a very small early period where a few enthusiasts were on bulletin boards (and definitely not "tons of sites").
As soon as the web was mainstream and had any appreciable amount of content, there were ads right alongside.
> Prior to the disestablishment 1995 commercial traffic on the Internet in the United States was limited by law, and prior to 1988 for the most part strictly forbidden, with the exception of traffic with research and defense aims.
Also the first cross-network banner ad ran in October 1994: https://hbr.org/2013/02/stop-selling-ads-and-do-someth
Nobody was getting their news from the web in that era though. People still subscribed to print newspapers and magazines.
Content has moved online. Of course revenue had to move online as well (including advertising).
ummm.... Actually a lot of people were. It just ended up being blogs, forums and other methods.
Personally, most of the news I read comes from "non-news" sources. I find the vast majority of news-sites to be terrible in quality.
The web was always presented as being free - the content was free, the browsers were free, the community that built it believed information wanted be free. Most people don't want to compensate anyone for anything on the web by viewing ads because they've been conditioned to expect that they shouldn't have to - they simply see advertising as a nuisance. Until recently when sites started detecting ad-blockers, there was no negative effect to blocking it.
I do believe advertising doesn't work on the web, but mostly because of the way the web was designed and implemented, not entirely because of politics. Content creators can't expect to be compensated through web ads as long as they can't stop users from viewing their content without the ads. At least with other forms of media, you're expected to pay before you consume, or viewership is estimated, so the effect of avoiding advertising isn't so direct, but on the web, every view counts.
Given the poor reputation (entirely deserved) of web ads, the degree of control users have over their browsers, and the number of people who view piracy and ad-blocking as a moral imperative, alongside the majority who just consider ads to be annoying and useless for them, it's simply not possible for advertising as a revenue model to work on the web. The number of people who consider "ethical" or "acceptable" ads to even be a thing isn't large enough to support the web's economy.
But there is money involved, a lot of 3rd parties inserting themselves between you and the creators are getting paid real money (Eyeo, through its "acceptable ads" campaign, is such a 3rd-party).
Surely that money is not created out of thin air, hence the question: where is this money coming from ultimately?
It's coming from advertisers, obviously. Unlikely so many on Hacker News, I don't think advertisers are inherently immoral and horrible people. I'm happy for them to pay for content and the technology to deliver that content.
Ironically, in this system the advertisers are actually subsidizing the blocking of non-compliant ads. That seems ideal: advertisers are competing to provide quality ads and to block poor ones.