While consuming the content, you’re avoiding paying some content its price, because you protest how the content guards its commercial interests. Thus, ahoy!
While consuming the content, you’re avoiding paying some content its price, because you protest how the content guards its commercial interests. Thus, ahoy!
The deal is between the person paying for the ad and the person displaying the ad.
I wasn’t ever involved in the deal, I owe them nothing.
you are involved in the deal, because advertisers pay by how many times the ad is displayed (or clicked). just like how you are involved in the deal between the distributor and cinema, because the pay depends on how many tickets you buy.
If that’s the extent of my involvement, Following that thought, an ad blocker means I’m not involved in the deal anymore?
as much as sneaking into a seat in a cinema without paying means you’re no longer involved in the deal. so yeah, you might have a point that you’re no longer involved in any deal, but i’d still call that piracy.
Correct, but how does that make it not piracy? Is something being piracy or not predicated on you being party to some deal?
Let’s say a movie is not released in my country. I cannot buy it so I torrent it. Did I not pirate the movie because there was no deal I was involved in? Because that’s what your argument says.
No it isn’t. I was talking about ad blocking.
Yep. I don’t recall signing any contract…
I think this is the only reply that hits the mark. Most of the others are mentioning malware, the morals of adverts or how obnoxious they are. To steal implies to take without payment, but the payment is not from the viewer, it is from the advertiser,who is paying.
I’d argue that blocking is more similar to taking a restroom break when a commercial is shown on the TV. No reasonable person would say that that’s stealing.
thing is with ads you can block, the advertiser is not paying if the ad is blocked.
i agree that taking a restroom break while an ad is showing is not piracy. that’s not blocking the ad, though.
I’ll try to argue about something I know little about. Don’t advertisers pay for ads served? Don’t many ad blockers work by hiding the ad from view, like making it’s size 0x0? On my older devices, I can see the ad show up, then disappear. Doesn’t that then imply that the advertiser must pay for the ad eve though it does not show on my device?
Going down the rabbit hole, doesn’t that then also imply that people using assistive technologies like a screen reader for the visually impaired are actually stealing content?
https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/95614/do-ad-impressions-count-if-the-user-is-using-an-adblocker summarizes Google Ads’s documentation at https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/141811?hl=en (TL;DR: pay depends on whether a script/request attached to the ad element is performed).
It’s true that different adblockers do different things, but the most popular ones do block the requests too. One of the most popular arguments for adblocking is performance and bandwidth. If we only hid the ad from view without doing that, we would not get the performance and bandwidth savings that adblock brings. So, µBO blocks the requests.
You can confirm yourself whether the request is blocked by searching “ad” (or “doubleclick” specifically for DoubleClick Ads, which are the majority of Google Ads) in your browser DevTools’s “Network” tab. Compare when the adblocker is off vs. on; for me with µBO the majority of requests aren’t even attempted and disappear when their entire element is ad-blocked, and in these cases the pay script doesn’t load either. The screenshot above only shows some requests that were attempted and blocked.
No, screen readers would still read ads. Just having the screenreader move to the next element is the same as scrolling past the ad. The difference is that if the advertiser doesn’t give alt-text, the content can become nonsensical. But the advertiser still pays.
You can approximately check an ad’s text for a screenreader with Firefox DevTools’s “Inspect accessibility properties” feature.