Any ad blocker I choose to run is ethical. I am under no obligation to load links suggested by the creator of some web page I happen to be looking at. If I choose to configure my user-agent in such a way that it fetches the targets of some links but not others, that is my business and mine alone.
The advertiser may have a contract with the publisher agreeing to pay for the placement of such links in the publisher's pages, but I am not a party to that contract and am under no obligation to follow up on these suggestions.
Agreed. Also, the ability to ignore ads has always existed in previous forms of media:
- I can mute my TV, change channels or leave the room when an ad comes on. I can legally record a TV show and fast-forward over the ads.
- I can skip over the pages in a magazine where the ads appear. I can clip just the articles I want to read and discard the rest of the magazine.
- I can read a book or sleep on the subway and not look up at the ads.
Network TV programs are 100% funded by ads, but nobody has ever claimed that I have an ethical obligation to view these ads (or to refrain from watching TV if I don't watch the ads). Why should ad-supported web sites have a different system of ethics than network TV?
Flipping over past a magazine page doesn't directly cause the publisher to miss out on revenue.
I'm not defending advertising. It's a pox on your society - a virus for our brains. The best ads are deliberate manipulative lies. Still, your logic is awfully convenient.
> The advertiser may have a contract with the publisher agreeing to pay for the placement of such links in the publisher's pages, but I am not a party to that contract
What you've described is it being legal to run an ad blocker, not it being ethical. It's legal to walk into a bank and drink the coffee they have out for their customers, but it's not ethical.
I do think that it's ethical to run an ad blocker, but this certainly isn't the way to convince people.
I find it a tricky balance personally. My view is that most advertising is inherently unethical. However that can be an easy copout. Certainly the fact that I enjoy (or at least use) the web sites so much can cloud my judgment.
If it wasn't something I rely on so heavily, I would go straight for the reasoning in your coffee/bank example.
Assuming the bank has not made a rule against it ( otherwise, taking the coffee would be taking the property w/o permission, which I would think would probably be illegal and probably unethical), I don't see why this would be unethical.
I can see how it could be kind of rude, and I can see why it might not be ethical to do it on a regular basis,
but it isn't obvious to me why if I particularly wanted some coffee, if I occasionally took some that they were giving away for free, and they did not require one to be a customer to take (note: I don't mean "if they don't enforce it", I mean if their permission to take the coffee is not restricted from applying to non-customers) any of it, I don't see why it would be unethical for me to take some of the coffee.
Though, generally I would feel like I ought to ask whether I am permitted to take the coffee. I wouldn't want to be wrong in my assumption that the coffee is being given away that I am a member of the group that it is being granted permission to have some of it. Alternatively, if it was busy, I guess I could ask one of the customers if I could have a coffee that they were being allowed to take?
Even more realistically, I don't drink coffee, and even if it was some other beverage that I did want, chances are that I would not want it badly enough that I would go into a bank that was giving it away to get it, when I could just buy it somewhere else.
But I still don't think it would be unethical to take a coffee that a bank is giving away, if the bank permits it?
I don't think a kantian(?) reason against it would work, because it would just end up as "the bank no longer permits people who are not customers to take any of the coffee" which would be effectively the same as what would happen if no one one who was not a customer took the coffee.
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Though, this does suggest a possible option for website which host ads to take:
For a first time user, instead of sending them the page contents, show them a screen with a (very simple and quick to read) contract. The contract would require the user to, when viewing the website, to not use ad-blocking software on the website. To proceed to the pages in question, the user would have to submit in a form the entire contents of the contract. The website would check that the contract the user sent matched the one they were provided, and provide the user with a cookie (unique to the user), to present to the webpage in the future, in order to see the actual pages. This way, only users who had agreed to not block the ads would be shown the webpages.
I don't think the sending the contract would necessarily be legally considered to be any more binding than checking an "I agree" box, but I think it would make it less ambiguous to me whether to consider the person to have agreed. They sent a message which contained the message, and stating that they agreed to it, after seeing the entire message, and (presumably) understanding that they would send a message saying that they agreed to it if they pressed the button that they pressed to send it. (or, if they sent it some other way).
I think in a situation like that, it would be relatively unambiguous that they were (ethically(?)) under a contract to not block the ads on the webpages they viewed on the website (to the best of their abilities).
Advertisers and content providers are always free to negotiate the price of an ad impression. Because of Adblock, many "impressions" now go (measurably!) unseen. So ad prices will drop - and in response, ad volume will go up.
But advertising budgets haven't changed! The world's marketing departments still have $X to spend on web ads, and the world's content providers get $X. The only thing that's changed is that they're now exclusively targeting the segment of people who don't use Adblock: customers who view web ads as useful/relevant and convert via that method more often.
There's nothing unethical about blocking ads. Nor will it be unethical when content providers introduce subscription models, or when advertisers buy up half the page. It's simply a big structural change in the market: ads are no longer deliverable to all users.
Eventually we'll all realize that web content is excludable (e.g. Netflix), and I suspect a lot more sites will move towards a hybrid model to capture revenue from ad-haters as well.
What is unethical about choosing which software to use to interpret an HTTP response in a manner of your choice? Is Lynx unethical now? Or disabling Flash?
If you don't want to show content... don't return a 2XX.
I don't think you should be downvoted for this. The server chooses what to send me, and I choose if and how to display it.
Is it also considered unethical not to install that bundled spyware with your favorite freeware app?
Or how about that trojan installer tried to download automatically when you somehow landed on their page? After all, you used up some of their computing resources by serving you the page, you owe them the installation of their malware.
If a 500MB data plan costs $50 and your website has 50MB of ads, you've just cost the user $10 to load your page
And then you made money off them too
Not to mention the extra wear on their batteries
Now who is unethical?
I'm OK with ads as long as they are
1) unobtrusive: don't get in the way of the content I'm trying to reach
2) policed to ensure they will not deliver malware to anyone
3) as few requests and as small (data-wise) as possible so
they don't interrupt my experience (eg, slow down page load)
4) no tracking of users
> unobtrusive: don't get in the way of the content I'm trying to reach
> You know, like a billboard.
There are people that think billboards are the worst kind of advertisement because they only block pretty views of nature rather than coming along side content that you want to see. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Beautification_Act
I've never been angry at a billboard, but then again I've never lived in a hellscape where they are the only thing in sight. And if I did I'd probably move away. And the advertisers would have to deal with it.
edit: maybe more accurately "a billboard has never obstructed my use of the highway, reduced my MPG, tampered with my car, or increased my cost of traveling in any measurable way"
Not to mention that they often target drivers who should be keeping their eyes on the damn road, not reading a billboard while traveling 65mph on the freeway.
(Edit: Thinking about it, I think I'm one of the few people in my state to ever obey the posted speed limits. So change "65mph" to "80mph".)
Radio, TV, Billboards, blimps, messages written in the sky, and so on. All those has to follow the same laws except for online advertisement which has continuously claimed that the only laws that they have to follow is those where the servers are located. Youtube, netflix, and spotify to mention a few already know how to geoblock so there is no technical excuse to not follow local laws.
The alternative is that online advertisement has to compete on the same level that offline advertisement does. If a company finds it is not worth investing time and money to find out what the local laws is, then there are local companies that already know how to operate and can take that market share from them.
There are however many global companies that has learned to follow local laws in each country they decide to operative in. McDonald's for example can't just ignore local food and health regulations and have a single system across all nations.
I'm getting really sick of whatever ridiculous justifications people make for using adblockers. People use adblockers because it's more convenient for them. If most crimes were as easy to commit as an adblocker is to install, we would have a lot more crime. When installing an adblocker nobody is actually thinking about all the revenue sites they visit get. None of these arguments are going to have any effect on adblock usage.
As for all those sites that exist because of ads, they'll either find a way to make ads unblockable (not hard if the ads are served from the same server as the content, making it impossible to differentiate them), find a different way to profit, or go bankrupt.
And, as long as I'm ranting, please stop saying "I disable my adblocker for sites that deserve it" as though there's something charitable about it. Companies aren't charities. If you don't let them go out of business, the thousands of others who don't care enough to disable their adblockers for them will.
Ads can lead to "MISGUIDED Information" , they can actually totally lie , is the website owner going to take responsibility in those cases ? Do website owners go to the extent to make sure that their viewers are not scammed or given any wrong directions by the AD code they have copy pasted to track their users ? Is that not unethical and irresponsible ?
I am completely in agreement with ad blockers , they are forcing people to think of alternate sources of revenue , even small businesses and bloggers .
This Cynide and happiness cartoon summarizes it all :) :)
Opting out of sites that rely on ads would force them to change as well.
Just because they are doing something wrong doesn't give us license to as well. That logic just isn't acceptable in most situations. adaAs the old adage goes, two wrongs..
Wait, does this load the full webpage first? It seems like it from the how it works explanation.
Because, in that case I'm not sure it does fit the criteria it proposes.
Instead, what it should do is keep a list of domains which are known to be ad supported, and then when the browser would send a page request for a page on that site, would instead not do that.
Why are you downloading the page if you aren't contributing towards the hosting costs by viewing the ads?
That is stealing just as much as you would be if you had any other adblocker running!*
No, it should /detect/ that the page is ad supported, but load it anyway the first time, and then block subsequent requests to the page all subsequent times!
* i.e. : not.
note: I don't run any adblock software other than a flashblock thing. If enough ads go to html5 video I might do something else though. Like only use webpages which don't use an unethical ad network.
"Let's fix this broken thing by breaking more things!" -- said no successful project, ever.
The problem isn't unethical browsing, it's unethical advertising. Until the industry shows an interest in cleaning up its act, it can bite my shiny metal ass.*
I remember my first Ad Blocker. It was called Spybot. It modified the hosts file on my computer to block websites that were known to provide Spyware (Mostly third party Advertisers).
I really don't care that much about advertisements, I'm really good at blocking those the old way; mainly by ignoring them. It's an ability honed by living through 90s television and internet. What I do care about is the fact that sites allow unethical third party sites to execute code on my computer and spy on me.
Ad-Blocking is nice when using Ghostery and AdBlocker; they make sites load faster and my screen less cluttered. But, for the most part I run them so I can stop allowing advertisers to damage my computer, make me vulnerable to fraudsters, and violate my privacy. In fact, more often than not they degrade my experience when I realize some functionality of a site won't run without some third party advertising platform.
Before we worry about implementing ethical ad-blocking we should talk about ethical advertising. With ethical advertisements I'm pretty sure the problem of ad-blocking will solve itself. Sure this will cut some revenue streams from companies, but the same goes for the restrictions on tobacco and alcohol ads.
While I may disagree with the author about blocking ads, I'm disappointed that so often we choose personal convenience/enjoyment over ethical concern (even when situations have great cost to others). I think it's a legitimate argument that you should quit Youtube if you aren't willing to be bombarded with ads.
For instance few would quit smoking weed even though a huge portion of it is supplied by cartels (who enact horrific violence). Same for eating meat, polluting, etc. These are just my pet examples (and can be debated) but the principle is there. Most are unwilling to go beyond buying something slightly different much less make any (even temporary) sacrifice.
I would love to see more willing to give up something they enjoy because it's hurting others.
The advertiser may have a contract with the publisher agreeing to pay for the placement of such links in the publisher's pages, but I am not a party to that contract and am under no obligation to follow up on these suggestions.