If you’re into fun experiments, you can also try putting a few pennies into a jar whenever you visit a website or write a script to simply block the sites you need to visit.
If you're able to justify something because of a technicality and are intentionally ignoring the ethics of the situation and what is clearly right/wrong... well, that's not a good look.
Anti-patterns designed to trick us into clicking, signing up, giving up more data, view another few seconds of ads. It never ends! So yeah, we block it. I don't feel sorry. If you don't think it's ethical then you're not paying attention to what's really going on. I used to go around installing Firefox for people before it was called that. Then adblockers, and now I go to people's houses and help them with a raspberry pi loaded with pi-hole. Fuck ads. Fuck that entire industry. And fuck everyone that works in that industry enabling them.
It’s not OK to get a robot that changes the channel for you or to have your magazines sent to a service who cuts the ads out and forwards them on to you.
The implication of your ethical argument was that avoiding ads causes the content creator to fail to get paid, and that's wrong.
There's no material difference between whether I avoid ads manually, or have software do it for me automatically. The end result is the same; the creator misses out on ad revenue. You can't cherry-pick the ad avoidance methods and say some are ethical and some are not when the supposed unethical act is depriving creators of payment.
It's not all black and white. If you want to charge me for content, charge me for content. If I think it's worth it, I'll pay. Don't force an unusable, emotionally-manipulative, probably malware-filled experience on me from the get-go because you don't otherwise have a sustainable business model.
Congrats.
I much prefer the way movies and podcasts so it, as in, having the advertisement as part of the content itself. Instead of plugging in ads on the side, podcasts have a small segment where the host mentions a product and gives their personal experience with it. Moves place products in the shot, which is also a kind of approval from the studio. Webpages, however, just throw in ads with no context, and it's completely jarring.
Part of the problem is that placing ads is much easier than working ad placement into an article, and another part is that paying for things online is a painful experience. I don't mind paying to remove ads, but I'm not going to sign up for a subscription service just to read an article without ads. I really hope something like GNU Taler becomes popular to make these types of microtransactions easier to manage. Even better, I would like something like Netflix, but for quality journalism where I pay a subscription for a variety of content.
I want content producers to get paid, I just don't like advertisements and juggling subscriptions.
(for people who haven't been to the US: coupons are printed on the back of the receipt)