Ethics of blocking ads · 2006-06-27 04:55 by Wladimir Palant

I found one of the better blog posts on the topic of ethical implications of ad blocking today. Being on the pro-adblock side of the discussion, it doesn’t fall for the usual “I don’t care how they earn their money” kind of argument.

So, obviously, there’s the first & most popular argument, “I run a website, it costs me money to do so, I need advertising revenue to pay for the website, adblocking robs me of this revenue.“ In other words, people should support bad business models because it’s more convenient for the businessmen.

And what follows is actually a nice argumentation about how alienating users with ads really is a bad business model and what webmasters and advertisers could do differently. I tend to agree on all points, surfing the web without ad blocking software is unbearable — and this misery can’t be justified with a vague “social contract”.

For the sake of fairness I want to quote the other side of the discussion here as well:

Adblock effectively robs these free sites of their revenue. If Internet Explorer came with a feature such as Adblock, you would effectively wipe out thousands of websites, maybe more.

So the question is: maybe these sites deserve to be wiped out?

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