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Now, I get that you're probably coming at this from "But hosting costs money and advertising is a way to recuperate the cost, so visiting the site but blocking ads is leeching bandwidth from the host without providing value back in the form of ad revenue".
But this doesn't hold up. All the cards are held by the content provider. If they -actually- have a problem with this, they have ways to stop it.
1. A server will always serve a request. That's it's job. So there's some unavoidable up-front cost to being a server on the internet.
2. But once it gets the request, it might serve a response that executes client-side Javascript that detects that an ad-blocker is running. At this point the content provider has a decision. They could block the requester. For example, redirect to a "Disable your adblocker" page. Or even in extreme cases blacklist the IP the request came from (though practically this doesn't happen). Heck, if things devolved into an arms race around ad-blocking detection, you could probably detect this server-side with some mechanism around serving a request to a browser while at the same time issuing a request to an ad provider to see if they received a corresponding ad content request within a certain window and if not, you know the ad was effectively blocked.
Ultimately it's not an obligation to accept ads. It's the content provider's prerogative to decide to deny service to ad-blocking clients, but realistically most content providers want traffic even if it's not generating ad revenue because of those sweet engagement metrics. If they don't, they have the tools to stop serving those requests.
Does that mean theaters don't really care or obligate consumers to pay?
If you will indulge the hypothetical, and we step back from the established social norms (people know you are expected to pay), who is responsible for making sure customers understand the need to pay? The theater. If the theater doesn't secure their doors and doesn't say anywhere "you must pay to enter," then it's a completely reasonable behavior for someone to enter and watch until they are asked to leave or pay. If they refuse to leave, they're trespassing. If they are told to pay before entering and they sneak in, this is clearly trespassing.
But this is not really the same thing as online advertising. Online advertising is more like, you ask them to deliver a DVD to your house, and the agreement is "we'll deliver the DVD if you also let us place a camera and microphone in your home to watch your reaction to the DVD." Then you allow the DVD in but refuse entry to the spy gear. It would be very problematic to try and force people to accept the spy gear, or prevent them from denying entry to the spy gear. It would lead to laws purposefully designed to deny people privacy and control over their own homes. A much better solution would be for the company to just not allow you to take the DVD unless you also take the spy gear and to create laws around that behavior if necessary.
I don't welcome a world of paid products that also include ads. Yet ads do make some paid products cheaper, like say a Kindle or a TV. Folks blocking ads from a premium product probably have a stronger defense. Those blocking ads from an entirely ad supported service less so.
Let's say I open a restaurant that advertises itself as "FREE PIZZA", and I give them a free pizza if asked but I also hand them a 2cm thick stack of ad flyers. Is it morally wrong to take that stack of advertising and just throw it away without looking at it while still eating the pizza? I (and I think most people) would say that throwing away the ads is totally acceptable; they're the fools giving away the free pizza with the hope that they'll drive business for the advertisers. If the free-pizza shop goes out of business because everyone throws away the ad flyers, that's something we consider totally ok because that's probably not a great business approach.
The only reason we consider ads online different is because it's become so normalized. We the users have come to expect many services for free, and the folks making their money by including the ads have become vocally entitled to users eyeballs and the money it makes them. They say "my business will fail if you block my ads; you owe me your eyeballs." Yeah, that's not my problem; I'm an audience member who owes the content-provider/service nothing and who's agreed to nothing (TOS's and EULA's have tried to move the goalposts on this after decades, don't be fooled), the only party the content-provider/service is actually doing business with is their advertising network, so they should figure it amongst themselves.
As for whether you can make blocking ads an ethical imperative, I'd agree that without ads, there likely wouldn't be an incentive to provide helpful, free services. If anything, it's theft of the value that other ad-consenting visitors are providing.
Most stores will gladly have you enter their store at a cost, the hardest and most expensive part of the process is getting you there.
Did the site force you to visit?
Personally, I don't believe ad blocking is unethical because I don't believe the ways in which advertisers collect and sell their data is ethical.
1. Companies selling paid products see ads as an additional revenue and not a way of filling a hole in the budget caused by price reductions. The price wasn’t reduced. That’s a fairy tale.
2. Even if (1) wasn’t true, the consumer seeing ads ends up spending more. They pay for the goods and services being advertised. If they didn’t spend more the whole ad business model wouldn’t work.
Not our problem. They're the ones sending free web pages to any client who requests. Their servers are free to return 402 Payment Required if they require payment.
Less if you block their ads and JS.
People don't want to work for you for free.
Because I don't have to.
> Do you prefer they keep making the ads worse to compensate?
They'll only be punishing users that haven't installed uBlock Origin yet.
> Or they paywall more?
No objection to that.
> Or make the ads 'native' and indistinguishable from useful content?
If I figure out someone is doing that, I'll never trust them again. I'll literally blacklist the site and if I see it posted here or anywhere else I'll point it out.
> People don't want to work for you for free.
They should start charging money then. Return 402 Payment Required instead of a free HTML page. If they send me ads, I will delete them. I won't be losing even one second of sleep over the matter. I'd delete real life ads too if could get away with it.
> This stance is absurd.
It's not 'absurd', because he did say "arguably", meaning that there's an argument to be made for either side of the issue (and a poster below makes an argument).
Pointing out that ad-blocking is arguably unethical is fine. If he had said "it's unarguably unethical", then sure, that's absurd, but the poster qualified his statement quite nicely.
Doesn't it also undermine producers ability to produce if you just get really good at quickly looking away?
It seems from your argument the "case could be made" that it's at least a little unethical to not spend at least a little while paying attention to each ad when reading a newspaper.
Like there's some scale where the left side has "0 attention spent, 0 ethical" and the right side has "maximum attention spent, maximally ethical".
You are being deceptive if you try and paint contemporary web ads as these cute little fairies that just want to help separate you from your money. Ads on the internet these days are by default stuffed with cookies and trackers they don't need in order to psychologically harass people who don't want to be subjected to that pollution.
Maybe instead of it being incumbent on the less-powerful end user to be perpetually disciplined where businesses aren't, businesses should stop employing invasive tracking and psychological warfare, and maybe if they don't choose to do that on their own they should have their business crushed under twelve-digit fines that come with the same penalties as US student loans until they decide to play nice with the rest of society. One investor did say we need to see more pain in this economy, and although this wasn't what he meant by that, I like my idea much better than his.
However, when ads are so obtrusive that they slow down my computer or ruin the use of the site completely, or if they have malware payloads (does happen) then I'm quite happy to use an ad blocker. I didn't use one until I started encountering this kind of nonsense regularly.
To consume the content without even considering ads makes it unethical.
If all an ad was was a static image, I might agree.
As it stands though, with RTB being what it is, ad blocking is the only means to protect yourself from a massive unethical, unconsensual breach of privacy.
You are a very bad person if you think adverts are morally justifiable in any form.
If you find these flyers genuinely helpful, and you explicitly gave them your consent to send you the flyers, then by definition it is no longer spam, and thus it is not immoral. But if you did not give your consent, then they are spamming you. How are they supposed to know if you want the flyers if you don't explicitly give your consent?
Maybe if I mailed you my shit, you'd find it useful, maybe not. But if I just mail it to you every week without your consent, it is the same thing as mailing flyers without your consent.
Is expressing a different opinion "pushing morals"?
So many accusations here. Apparently I'm subhuman, a bad person, and of low moral character. All because I think the exchange of ad impressions for otherwise free access to content is a tolerable bargain, and that subverting the trade is problematic.
Advertising is unethical. I would encourage you to start with considering that position, read some opinions on this topic, and spend time considering the harm that advertising causes not only directly on the human, but also the incentives and ecosystems and structures of capitalism that advertising enables and perpetuates that also harms humans.
It is possible you simply don't hold the same values as me and many other people. Namely that people should not be harmed, capitalism perpetuates a lot of harm, people have rights to protect themselves from harm, and whether the means justify the ends.
I wish you well regardless.
After you confirm your humanity to the best extent you can, proceed to reexamine your ethics.
Also, kettle, you're the one telling people they're behaving unethically.
If the very thought or argument makes people uncomfortable, even when they disagree, that is not my responsibility.