Idea is they will get paid for those clicks.
Wonder if others do this as well.
Advertising is so close to lying, that I feel very comfortable in doing this.
If I couldn't block the ads for some legal reason, I'd try to come up with a way to fake-click on ads, so as to spread disinformation about myself. The advertisers are almost certainly lying to me, so I'm going to lie to them.
Seeing advertising as a lie is a black and white (true/false, all/nothing) view of things. Viewing the world under this lens will make you most often frustrated and bitter. The world if not black or white, it's full of colors.
Advertisers don't want you to do this since you're spending their money for no possible gain. They only advertise with the expectation they'll earn more than it costs in new sales. Too many clicks for the purpose of donating to website owners and that won't happen, so they'd have to stop advertising.
Networks don't want you to do this because if advertisers can't make a positive return on investment, it doesn't make sense for them to advertise with that company, and they'll go elsewhere or go out of business. Either way, it's a threat to the network's existence.
Morally, it's very much not OK, for two reasons:
1) Small businesses have to market themselves to make people aware of what they're selling in order to survive. Simply opting out of advertising because some people are abusing it to give their money to website owners is not an option. Neither is advertising somewhere else for millions of businesses; Google controls too much of the ad space and traffic. There are no substitutes in many situations.
2) If you work a normal job, telling advertisers to accept this situation is the same as telling you that a condition of receiving your paycheck is that random people on the street have permission to reach into your pocket and take some money out whenever they want. That's what clicking on ads just to give money to website owners is. You may or may not have enough left over to pay your bills. Sound good?
Eh, I think I'm done with the Internet for today. Might run afoul the click police.
It makes more of a difference to an advertiser than your vote makes in the presidential elections. Do you vote?
Also, keep in mind that the largest part of the money you just "donated" goes to Google and not the web publisher.
I block ad's because I don't want to see them no more than I would want to see them in a library. But I'm sure advertisers would rather me block their ad's than to click on ones I wasn't genuinely interested in.
I block ads because of the obnoxious practices of some of the ad networks. I let some ads through from networks or individuals that are not obnoxious to me.
I also remember the early days when a slow ad server would keep a whole page from rendering (Hello ESPN)
I also don't block ads.