Mises Blog: "There is nothing ethically or morally wrong with an ad-blocker." | Hacker News Reader

Mises Blog: "There is nothing ethically or morally wrong with an ad-blocker."

blog.mises.org

12 pointsnickb7 comments

From one of the comments on that page:

Attention Site Owners:

Visitors are not responsible for supporting your business model whether it be ad-based or anything else. Business involves risk. If you decide to employ a poor model, such as requiring your visitors to view or click on your ads, and your visitors choose not to. Guess what. That's called a bad business model.

If your poor argument was applied to other businesses, say, grocery stores for instance, it would be an act of theft to go into a grocery store and not buy something or view the in-store ads. By your reckoning, you should then be banned from entering that store. Stupid? Of course it is, but that's your argument.

Here's a tip. If you want to make money, why not offer something of real value to your visitors like a product or service. Provide content that is so good that people will want to pay for it. That's called doing good business.

Begging people to look at your ads for junk they neither want or need is nothing but ad welfare.

I hadn't heard that argument, and I must say that I find myself agreeing with it. On some level, the whole advertising system is a giant house of cards. I have never heard of anyone buying anything from an ad they clicked on, yet ads are so prevalent. At some point, businesses are going to stop throwing invested money at worthless ads and instead are going to find other means for promoting their products.

Interesting, but this is just stupid:

> Here's a tip. If you want to make money, why not offer something of real value to your visitors like a product or service. Provide content that is so good that people will want to pay for it. That's called doing good business.

If sites supported entirely by advertising had no "real value" then people probably wouldn't be using them so much... The commenter has no clue about internet "business."

> Begging people to look at your ads for junk they neither want or need is nothing but ad welfare.

And this is exactly the FAULT of google. It is incredibly counter-productive that publishers cannot directly support the advertised products as is the case with CPC advertising.

You're right. I mostly was intrigued by his stance regarding business models. Consumers often find ways of using products in an unintended manner, and if your business model does not recognize and account for that, you are likely missing out on a valuable resource. Consumers blocking ads is just another example of an unexpected usage of a product, and if you are not prepared for that, you are trying to ignore the nature of smart web users who just want to get at the information or service without all the distractions. There must be some other way to cater to these individuals without the use of ads, while still managing to get some benefit from their traffic.

One example, which requires no work on the part of the site owner, is realizing that the fraction of people who are blocking ads probably has a large overlap with the fraction of people who use Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, and other social news/bookmarking sites. So on one hand, ad-blocking individuals are detracting slightly from the revenue stream, while on the other hand, they may be doing valuable work to promote your site to others.

If advertisers and ad-sellers hadn't spent the last two decades squandering their credibility by abusing weaknesses in browser technology, hadn't been lazy about allowing large file sizes, and hadn't recklessly pursued intrusive, garish or distracting psychological ad designs, then people wouldn't have spent so much time fighting back.

Google showed users a little respect, and made billions.

In a business relationship, anything permitted by the law of the land is ethically sound.

The other question is what kind of effect ad based business models have on the economy and on startups. We all know that someone has to pay at some point. So ad based models are basically a way to shift that burden around to where it is most easily enforceable or acceptable for the consumer. Since startups are on average less able to enforce rules or gain consumer acceptance, they profit from ad based models more than others.

I believe to a large degree, the overuse of ad based business models is the result of not having an effective micro payment system. It doesn't make sense to buy a subscription to every single news site I'm consuming. It's just not practical. It's not even practical to explicitly agree to terms of service. Unfortunately micro payment systems suffer from a huge number of problems. Privacy being just one of them.

I read a sci fi book where ads were effectively a micropayment mechanism. You built up credit by watching ads, and you couldn't do certain things online when your ad credit was too low. So you could have a screen with lots of ads open in your loungeroom for an evening and top it up.

This article doesn't really say much, but it raises an interesting point. As a user I'm often annoyed by ads (especially big flashy banner ads that also happen to come with sound). Google's ads I don't mind so much except for sites that seem to have ads placed in 3 or 4 different places (across the top, a side bar, in the middle of an article and somewhere at the bottom). So I can see AdBlocking being useful (although I haven't used ad blocking tools for a while).

From the point of view of a web startup however advertising is what pays for the content so the users don't have to. Users end up paying with their attention instead of dollars. So when they try to subvert your ads they are essentially violating your terms of service.

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