When an advertiser purchases a slot in some broadcast, they are doing so with the guarantee that their advertisement will play during that slot; they do not have the guarantee that the end user's eyeballs will actually be watching the ad.
However, ad skipping and ad blocking technology is making it so advertisers aren't even guaranteed their ad will even play during the slot they purchased - it may be programmatically skipped. If the ad is skipped, someone loses out, and it's (usually) not the end user.
Basically what I'm saying is that if you are watching Crunchyroll episodes with an ad blocker enabled, you are (basically) stealing from either Crunchyroll or the ad network (whoever is swallowing the stolen bandwidth costs). The honest thing to do would be to subscribe to Crunchyroll premium if you don't want to watch the ads.
I know not every site has this option, and I know there's an argument to be made against double dipping (i.e. paying once for cable, and a second time by watching ads on said cable), but for things like YouTube and Crunchyroll which have official ad-free variants, it would be dishonest in my opinion to use the ad supported version with an ad blocker.
Just my opinion, though.
What a crock. If someone wants to try making a quick buck by programming their computer to spam machines all over the world with millions of ads, it's absolutely legitimate for people to program their own computers to discard such junk.
If that first person's parasitic activities don't make as much money as they predicted, then the failure lies in their prediction.
> Users want to have their cake and eat it too.
Everyone wants that; yet I don't think it's the users who are actually trying it.
Users who block ads are actually eating the site owner's cake. For example, visitors to my (ad-free) site implicitly rely on me paying the hosting and domain fees, i.e. making my cake available for them to eat. Since the cost is small and the enjoyment I get from running the site is high, I'm happy with this arrangement; and would stop if that were no longer the case.
On the other hand, those plastering their sites with ads to make money are the ones trying to have their cake and eat it: they're trying to make a profit from something that is not profitable. They can't lament any loss of money, since it's their fault for giving it away (either directly via hosting fees, or via the opportunity cost of e.g. creating unprofitable content/services instead of something people are willing to pay for).