""" People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small.
They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it.
They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck That.
Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you.
They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
Banksy """
Source: http://www.elephantjournal.com/2013/01/banksy-manifesto/
Good thing I have control of my software and can opt out.
I'm already assaulted at the senses all day long in different forms. The whole concept of advertising I find abhorrent. A service should only offer itself to me when I want it, otherwise they are just imposing themselves and I will dislike them for that.
Any way that I can opt-out of ads I will make use of.
Services that rely on just this business model should adapt or fail, simply. If the service is relevant it will come again from a different source with a more acceptable model.
They have been and will continue to be the targets for malicious hackers who use them to serve malware to unsuspecting site visitors.
Until those ad networks are properly secured and monitored I will treat them as a security liability.
In many cases site admins go completely overboard with advertising creating a broken user experience. They choice you have then is to vote with your clicks and go elsewhere or attempt to use the site with an ad-blocker.
If any site admin wishes me to go elsewhere they can block users with ad blockers installed. If the site has value then they an ask POLITELY to whitelist their site; which for many sites I do add then to a site wide whitelist.
Assuming your site visitors of being thieves is not only stupid but illogical. If I walk past a billboard with my eyes close should I have them surgically removed because their are an adblocker? If I use a PVR to skip ads on TV am I stealing content? No; I am exercising a choice not to look at your pointless adverts.
The adverts add nothing to my experience of your site; I don't click on them so you won't be making any money from me for displaying them anyway.
Either find some other way to monetize your site (subs, sell merchandise, ask for donations etc) or find something else to do.
Example: I only bother to block them on my main computer, but don't on my phone, desktop, etc. Your average Joe is unlikely to start doing so soon.
They don't give a shit. To them the ads are just annoying and they're getting rid of them. They don't even read TOS agreements, let alone agree to some implicit contract where advertisements are required.
Also: nitpick. The people who created adblock aren't thieves in the same way the founders of the Pirate Bay aren't necessarily pirates. They themselves aren't stealing anything, just mass-producing a method whereby it's possible (in your opinion). I'm not trying to argue semantics, but if they were charged for something, it wouldn't be thievery.
Believe it or not, not everybody in the world gets to enjoy super fast internet connection speeds, cos they live in countries that are not so well developed or they are in very rural places. Why should they have to sit through waiting for irrelevant content to load? And the adverts are not relevant to them cos Google has no advertisers in their region? And they are on bandwidth capped plan so they are paying to see these adverts?
Blocking ads has deprived nobody of their property unless you believe that a site is owed the revenue from ad impressions from its visitors (it's not). This is the same line of thinking of the MPAA with regard to how it approaches licensing.