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Are content consumers obligated to buy a certain amount of advertised goods per year in order to continue to have access to the content? No, of course not. Are people who read magazines obligated to spend as much time looking at ads as the content? Are people who watch over the air TV obligated to stay in the room while ads come on instead of making a snack or going to the bathroom?

Of. Course. Not.

There's something very puritanical about the idea that there is and should be a contract between content makers and content consumers whereby people "pay" for their content through suffering through ads. Would we see things any different if every site supported themselves through obnoxious spam email campaigns?

Content creators have no right to my eyeballs or my attention, they cannot simply sell it away to advertisers as a way to make money.

I appreciate that advertising has often been the easiest source of revenue for content sites, but it's a broken system and I never bought anything from ads anyway. I'm not going to suffer just so you can keep a broken system propped up for longer.

I pay for content. I support people on patreon, I support kickstarters, I buy merch, I buy books, movies, albums, yadda yadda yadda. I've probably spent mid five figures on content in my lifetime. No, I'm not going to feel even a little bad by blocking shitty ads. I'm sorry you've monetized making my content consuming experience shittier, find a better way.

> Are people who read magazines obligated to spend as much time looking at ads as the content? Are people who watch over the air TV obligated to stay in the room while ads come on instead of making a snack or going to the bathroom?

You have no obligation to acknowledge the ad. Nobody ever said you did. You are not required to read or click on any advertisement, ever. But you have to allow that advertisement to be served, otherwise you are not paying for the content. And that is the price of the content: having the ads served.

> Content creators have no right to my eyeballs or my attention, they cannot simply sell it away to advertisers as a way to make money.

This is such an illogical statement, that I'm nearly speechless. Nobody has ever made the claim that they possess ownership of your attention. Again, you are under no obligation to view or interact with an ad.

> ... I never bought anything from ads anyway. I'm not going to suffer just so you can keep a broken system propped up for longer.

Really? Suffer? Is that the word you're going to use? Nobody is demanding you buy anything. I guess I'm sorry if you feel that ignoring ads is such a huge personal burden that it's having detrimental effects on your life. But that's a you problem.

> No, I'm not going to feel even a little bad by blocking shitty ads.

Ah, and here's the rub. You don't know if you're blocking shitty ads, because you're blocking all ads. You could be visiting a site which contains content that you appreciate, and only displays ads in a tasteful, non-shitty way. But you'll never know. And that's what makes you part of the problem, not the solution.

> But you have to allow that advertisement to be served, otherwise you are not paying for the content.

When is this contractual obligation established?

The first HTTP request goes to the host's server before I am even aware of whether they wish to send ads or not.

At that point neither party has agreed to any obligation.

"Have to"? That's a strong phrase. I don't have to do anything. I can filter the content delivered to me however I want. There's no EULA, no TOU, that lays down a quid pro quo of content for ads.

"Nobody has ever made the claim that they posses ownership of your attention." I think you misunderstand the entire advertising business then. It is the selling of "impressions" of some slice of "attention", else it would have no value. If I am under no obligation to view an ad then I am under no obligation to have an ad made viewable to me, period.

As for the term "suffering", way to derail an argument with semantics. That term was chosen because it fits in with the typical puritanical worldview of having to "earn" anything good by paying for it with toil. There's no value to me being even the slightest bit inconvenienced by an ad, zero. It's just an artifact of a broken accounting system and I refuse to let it rule over me like some bizarre kafkaesque daydream.

I support content creators. I pay for content. I do my part.

I spent 20 years looking at ads on the web. I'm done.

No - we seem to be at a misunderstanding here.

I believe content creators should not deliver their content to me at all if they feel that delivering content to me at a loss is not worth it. I have no privilege to receive their content and they are under no obligation to provide me with it.

The fact that they continue to deliver content to me at a loss shows that they value their Google Ranking and the possibility of me sharing the article to outweigh the cost of providing me with the content. They are making a cost-benefit analysis and deciding to show me the content anyways. The benefits of showing me the content, even at a loss, are superior to not showing me the content at all.

If they have an issue with that - they can bring it up with Google. It isn't my problem that they care about their Google ranking. It's their problem with Google.

I'm sorry, but it appears you are completely ignorant of the technological complexities involved in denying a user content based on whether or not you are blocking ads from a third party provider. It has nothing to do with search engine rankings or the trivial potential of "free promotion" by sharing the content. It has nothing to do with Google at all, in fact. I'm not sure where you're even coming from with that argument.

I think the previous poster might be referring to the fact that if you click on a result in a Google SERP (search engine results page), and then hit back and click on another result (e.g. due to the site not allowing you to view the content), in aggregate that site gets a severe ranking penalty.

Given the prevalence of adblock users, a site that implements this (which is not hard at all -- just check if `<div id='ad' style='height:1px'></div>` has a height of 1 or 0) will quickly drop off Google.

My point was that this has nothing to do with the morality of ads being delivered or blocked.

> It may be your browser, but it is their content being served via their infrastructure. It costs them real money to create and host this content.

Then they shouldn't send me that content if they don't want me to do whatever I want with it. Because that's my goddamn right.

Frankly, if ad revenue is the way they're funding the development of their content, then I want them to stop. Just stop. Find another way to fund it, or don't send it to my computer in the first place.

I own a physical store. It has a door. You walk through it. You then decide you don't like some aspect of my store. That doesn't entitle you to walk out with merchandise, declaring "well, you shouldn't have opened your door in the first place."

It is not your "goddamn right" to dictate how a business generates revenue, nor does it make any sense whatsoever to insist that the burden of denying content is the creator's. Your argument can easily be turned around on you. If you're not willing to pay for the content (via allowing ads, in this case), then you shouldn't be demanding the content in the first place.

I'm not "demanding" the content. You're choosing to send it to me. I'm not walking into your store, I'm surfing the web, you're throwing your "goods" (if you see them that way) into my home. My computer. Under my control. My computer will block ads if I want, mostly I don't even know if sites have ads or not. Not my problem.

I'm happy to pay for goods. I'm not happy to see ads -- I never want to see them, they are a menace. I pay for tons of ad-free content.

Sending an HTTP request to a server is no different than walking through the door of an establishment. You don't see the "content" of the store until you walk through the door.

Deciding afterwards that you don't agree with how the website is monetized but then consume the content anyway, is the same as deciding you don't like how the physical establishment operates, but you feel entitled to take something anyway.

There is no logical difference, and you are using a completely false justification.

> Sending an HTTP request to a server is no different than walking through the door of an establishment. You don't see the "content" of the store until you walk through the door

Walking through the door of an establishment also does not make the person obligated to pay for seeing the content.

Anyway, anyone who knows basics about how the www technology operates and its history knows that's false analogy. Sending an HTTP request to a web server makes no promises to the owner of the web page or other data the server sends. There is no human-level contract or trade in the sense "content for ads" implied. It may be how the operation is payed for by the owner, but nobody ever asked the consumer. For contract/trade to happen, both parties need to agree on terms and willingly enter it.

> is the same as deciding you don't like how the physical establishment operates, but you feel entitled to take something anyway.

It is not the same. Nobody takes a thing from the owner when using adblocking software.

> There is no logical difference, and you are using a completely false justification.

There is a physical difference. Donuts will be missed, copies of cat pictures will be not. Eventually, even logic must give way to physics.

Exactly zero of your arguments have a logical basis. Literally all of the things you just said are completely ignorant of reality. It is so far beyond mind boggling that anyone could genuinely believe any of that, and I can only assume you're just trolling.

Which reality is that? The one where people believe that just using a web page creates a contract with the website owner? Don't be ridiculous. This is not what most people subscribe to, even though big media corps and you would like them to. It is not the reality, it is a pipe dream. In reality, contract/trade happens by voluntary agreement on terms by both parties.

> "Sending an HTTP request to a server is no different than walking through the door of an establishment."

Of course it's different. It's not even close to being similar.

Sending an HTTP request is much more like asking sears to send you the catalogue for this season. It's a REQUEST, they can REFUSE.

If they do send me one, I can do whatever I want with it, including throwing it in the garbage or my fireplace.

They might include stuff you don't want in the catalogue, but you can just rip them out. And if, after dozens of issues you realize they always put the unwanted stuff every 10 pages, you could build a machine that rips out every 10th page before you even look at it.

Now, Sears could say they don't like that I'm doing that, but I don't care (nor should I). IF it really is annoying enough to them, they'll just stop sending me the catalogue.

And with HTTP requests, I'm even paying for the bandwidth via my ISP! When they answer to my request, they cost me money, just like I'm costing them money.

> Sending an HTTP request is much more like asking sears to send you the catalogue for this season. It's a REQUEST, they can REFUSE.

You're completely ignoring the technological factors in delivering content online. If you were arguing that your ad blocker made the server aware of its usage via the HTTP request's headers, and the server could use that information to deny a request, then you might have a legitimate basis for your argument. But it doesn't, and you don't.

> They might include stuff you don't want in the catalogue, but you can just rip them out.

Exactly. You just made my argument for me. You received the content, and decided to ignore other content which you didn't want to see after it has already been delivered. You have paid the price of admission by accepting the document as the creator intended. But when you prevent the other content from showing up in the first place, you have entered into the world of immorality. You're demanding content be delivered the way you want it, at the literal financial expense of its creator, which is absurd.

> And with HTTP requests, I'm even paying for the bandwidth via my ISP! When they answer to my request, they cost me money, just like I'm costing them money.

That's an entirely illogical comparison. You made the request with the complete understanding that when you navigate to a website, it will serve the content to you, and that the request for that content knowingly costs them money, and costs you money. But it's entirely at your request. You are paying your ISP for the capability to make that request, and nobody forced you to make it or pay for it. So when you do make the request but block the ads, you are forcing the content creator to pay for it, and then refusing them their ability to recoup that cost. You are not paying the content creator by paying your ISP. It's an illegitimate comparison.

Except that sending a HTTP request to a server you get copy or version of the content, which is no longer the property of the content creator. Physical store owners enjoy inherent DRM but your analogous physical store owner seems to wish for DMCA like control over digital content. What if lynx/links is used ? There are no legal or moral-rights 'physical store owners' have to decide how a URL is fetched and interpreted on the some one elses property.

As I've said a few times now in different ways, if you received the content as the creator intended and then removed the ads, you would have a perfectly legitimate argument. But that's not what you're doing. You're preventing them from being delivered at all, while still consuming the content at the direct financial expense of the content creator. You are taking advantage of the technological ability to access content without paying the price of admission. It is absolutely immoral behavior, no matter how you would like to spin it.

So what if I'm using Lynx as my browser? Or if I disable images/Javascript (broader scope than blocking ads specifically)?

What if I have a specific ad agency they happen to employ being blocked in my hosts file? Is it my fault they use Google AdSense instead of Yahoo Listings?

The crux of your argument rests on the user knowing what they are requesting before receiving it. The problem with that is they don't know what they are requesting until they have already obtained it. The page they are requesting could be 200kb of plaintext or it could be 26MB full of high-retina images and javascript.

Since they do not know what a page contains until after they download it - it's within their place to preemptively block things like images, javascript, and flash to save bandwidth or for security reasons.

Furthermore, ads are almost always hosted by a 3rd-party. When I visit example.com I am under no obligation to download anything that does not originate from example.com as my intention is to visit example.com not googles-invasive-ad-network.google.com. If I wanted to visit googles-invasive-ad-network.google.com, I'd enter that URL into my browser in place of example.com

I do have some issues with your reasoning for why a user is morally obligated to perform certain actions however.

>You have paid the price of admission by accepting the document as the creator intended. But when you prevent the other content from showing up in the first place, you have entered into the world of immorality.

If downloading what the content creator has on their site is my moral obligation; am I morally obligated to download malware/viruses if they are included on the page? If the answer is "no", why not? [0]

>if you received the content as the creator intended and then removed the ads, you would have a perfectly legitimate argument.

So if I wget/curl the page then remove the ads by editing the .html file before viewing the file, I'm morally in the clear? AFAIK wget/curl does not count as an ad impression for popular ad agencies. I am willing to accept that I could be wrong on this, as I couldn't find any information on it and am relying on years-old memory.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pleading