The case for ethical ad-blocking

To flip the question; how is stealing my bandwidth; time and data ethical? To then accuse me of a crime if I choose not to accept that is rank hypocrisy. Plus blocking ads is the sensible thing to do...not blocking them gives you a significantly greater chance of catching a dose of something unpleasant.

Bands are fighting a war on 3 fronts; search engines; advertising and rights agencies. But there's iTunes etc; and there's nothing stopping bands from selling their own tunes on their own sites...it's not expensive or particularly hard to do.

Any musician who feels entitled to earn a living from YouTube needs to re-examine their business model. YouTube is advertising for the artists whose material it hosts -- the commercial ads are there to earn the revenue to pay for that service. Cut off your nose to spite your face if you like, and see what happens to your viewer numbers.

Easy Decision

100% ethical while the risk of being served malware exists.

I love Youtube's ads

Many's the time I've thought, I'm really in the mood to hear Johanna Martzy play the Bach Chaconne from Partita no. 2 - but ONLYif it's preceded by a short informative movie about British Gas repairing central heating boilers.

When is ad-blocking ethical?

It's a ridiculous question to ask. Nobody owes you a living.

After that, the rest is really irrelevant but is equally "nobody owes you a living".

I have no ethical problem with ad-blocking

Our security subscription allows us to ad-block at our corporate firewall. I just had to enable the category "Advertisements".

It's funny, we have had a content filter available on our firewall for years, but never enabled it. Management has always been fairly liberal with filtering/tracking here at the company. They have always had the opinion that if they thought they had to nanny employees that much, they shouldn't be working here. In fact, they did terminate an employee a while back for abusing (and I mean really abusing) Farcebook.

It was finally the annoying ads that made us enable the content filter. So far, the only content we block is ads! It took a while for me to get the okay. There were some discussion about the ethics of ad-blocking, since we are a business that needs advertising. But, the recent stories of malware spreading via the ad networks finally sold it. It's the lack of policing their content that led to the blocking of ads at our company.

Everyone that works here is finally seeing how the web really should be!! People are coming to me to see how to get an ad blocker for their home PC.

Ethics don't don't come into it.

If you have good content I'll pay to see it. Don't need frustrating irrelevant ads getting in the way.

And yes targeted ads are a fantasy. They don't exist. I'm a huge Amazon shopper and they cant even get "Due to your shopping habits you might be interest in..." lists right so what chance so who are the ad networks trying to kid?

The only web folks that are worried about this are the ones that just steal and link to other superior content. They can die off today for all I care. Either provide it for free or if you want to get paid for it, make people pay for it. You might be surprised.

View from inside

I'm an ad-blocker, who owes a living to the ad industry. So I'm a massive hypocrite and many of you will despise me immediately.

First thing to understand, the advertising industry is largely about burying one's head in the sand about the effectiveness of the ads that are run. So, everyone knows that TV ads are muted/ignored/skipped etc but it's very difficult to measure by how much and what impact that has. So, mountains of money is 'wasted' on advertising on TV, and has been for years.No-one really questions it. It's a big industry relying on it to keep going. On the flipside, it is very hard to argue with advertisers who find their phones ringing off the hook the days after their TV ads are broadcast. You and I may happily ignore ads, but a lot of people don't. Remember, the vast population of this once great country are not Reg readers, they watch Simon Cowell drivel and read the Sun. This is an elitist statement, but it is true.

Back on topic: online ads have always been measurable. You deliver an ad, the view is counted, the click is counted, you visit the advertisers website sometime later, that is all joined up and hey presto - online ads work. So when a technology comes along that blocks those ads - it can be counted and measured. It's fundamentally not the same as people flipping the page in the newspaper. There is a spreadsheet telling you 30% of your ads weren't seen. Even the herd mentality ad industry can't ignore that. So whilst to the punter ad-blocking is no different to traditional TV ad-skipping, to the ad world it isn't.

But is it ethical? Stupid question. An ad-funded site is able to pay journalists to write stories largely thanks to the revenue generated by the advertising on that site. That site could quite easily block access to those running ad-blockers and put up a 'Donate to us and we'll give you access without ads' message. As long as that user is then given an ad-free experience then everyone's happy, right? It is a straightforward transaction.

Sounds good in theory but even the biggest publishers struggle to maintain enough paywall income to sustain their operation. The Internet is too big and the same info (euphemistically known as 'content') is normally available from somewhere else for nothing. The economics of scarcity do not apply. As a result, and this is inevitable, gradually more and more publishers will go out of business as ad-blockers faced with a 'Pay Now' message simply bugger off somewhere else. Publishers can't run at a loss and are not (often) charities. The Guardian is one of the biggest global news sites, yet is still cutting it's workforce year on year, and it IS a charity, near enough!

We can all smugly sit here (me included) blocking ads and making superior comments about pop-ups and flashing ads taking over the screen, ads for things 'I'll never buy anyway' being constantly shown etc etc.But unless there is some sort of truce, we will in some way have contributed to the downfall of the 'free' and 'open' web.

Phew.

well ok, so this is in the context of music streaming services

... but still, I wholeheartedly support the idea. I pay Deezer a monthly fee, so I can listen to whatever I want, from vast catalogue (was Spotify, until I decided I no longer like them). I also check YouTube for songs I want to learn playing, but I feel uneasy not knowing if artist is happy to have his songs there. I think mostly they do, the kind of songs I'm looking for wouldn't be in streaming catalogue anyway, since they are rarely, if ever professionally recorded. Anyway I would be happier, and I hope artists would be too, if this piratical gambit under the name of "add-supported streaming" died. Either streaming is free (e.g. promotion) or is included in some catalogue I subscribed to.

Ads don't normally bother me, I use ad block plus because some sites ads are always causing Firefox to hang or crash, Firefox hasn't crashed since I started using it :D

As long as the bandwidth required isn't too onerous, and the ads don't flash or animate, I don't mind when sites request that I turn off ad-blocking -- I'm getting content for free, so the least I can do is download ads and ignore them.

But nowadays sites like Wired and Forbes hide their content if you're blocking *trackers*. That's a whole 'nother animal. I'll read your ads, but I'm damned if I'm going to let you and your affiliates track me all over the Web.

I'm ad-blocking, but if I hear some music I'm actively putting in the effort to find a way of purchasing directly form the artist... and that goes for all things including books, films, whatever way I can get. Sure, it isn't convenient for me, and I've even spent more buying books via Hive than Amazon.

The problem is that for every band that is big enough to have a voice, that won't miss the few percent, there's loads of smaller bands for whom that few percent is not only everything they have coming in... but it also represents their dreams of one day making it big.

I get more of a cut if people buy my books directly from my publisher, and I highlight these links on my author page... but still people will go buy via Amazon, or iBooks, or some middle agent, because that's how the big guys have stacked the deck... they not only provide the content, but also the equipment on which to read it... and favour their own systems.

There are plenty of places in the chain where the links are broken. Some of it is down to our own preference for convenience. Some of it is how we let the big guys manipulate the market so they have closed systems. Some of it is down to the contracts, like the music companies signing up good bands to contracts and never actually do anything with the band, but the contract stops them from taking another contract with anyone else, and the companies won't release the bands from the contract they've signed. Effectively dooming the band to obscurity.

I'm just screwing the middle man and trying to get my money to the artist in the most efficient way possible. If that takes ad blocking, and more research on my part, then so be it. There are times when I have no option other than to buy from the middle men that I hate so much... but I won't call myself a hypocrite and return to my old ways... this is an ongoing war.

When are ads ethical?

When they're heavily regulated, and don't try to scam you, use pseudo-science / lie in any way, or sell you junk food that will damage your health.

So basically never.

NoScript + Adblock Plus

I use NoScript and Adblock Plus. and they are both turned on for all sites with a few exceptions for Noscript. (oracle.com and other sites I use for work)

Every now and then I disable Adblock on a few sites that might deserve it and I recently expermiented with theregister.co.uk and regmedia.co.uk and found, to my surprise, that the only change was the addition of the banner for some continuous live beer drinking or something in London. No other ads at all.

Noscript, however, shows that you want me to allow scripts from google-analytics, googletagservices, dpmsrv and admedo.

I suppose that the ads come from these pages, but there is no way I am allowing random 3rd party sites to run scripts in my browser if I can help it.

I can live with the banner at the top so I haven't reenabled adblocker for the reg again.

Dave

Ads and speed testing

Coincidentally I was speed-testing an ADSL line for a client earlier today. It got an extra 1Mb/sec when I installed AdBlock Plus...

Is it ethical to shove adverts into your speed tester *while the test is being run*?

See all of the above

- there's the answer to your question.

Big Tech ?

Big Tech is the wrong name.

Entities like YouTube are merely publishers, and they've always been the middlemen that ripped off artists. That they're using the tech resources of their parents (google) doesn't make them tech companies themselves.

All adblocking is ethical. Unethical behavior includes auto-play videos that somehow never need to buffer and play at higher quality than the actual video. Given that most people access their internet content on smartphones with limited data plans, pushing content that is not requested by the user (ie ads) is actually theft of bandwidth and data quota.

If I take a site like this one and in addition to entering text into fields and hitting the submit button, inject code to affect the database, I have committed a felony via unauthorized computer access. However, if I click a link to this website and it injects code to insert data into my client, they have done nothing wrong?

Its my choice not googles

If companies want to rely on advertising then they cannot be intrusive, which is the case on many websites. You see the content loading slowly, usually because of the heavy advertising content. So that's what encourages most people to start ad blocking.

For me I buy a subscription to Spotify and other sites I am truly interested in. But even these stick ads in my face, which is even more reason to block.

Ethical ad blocking?

What fucking bollocks is that? It's MY fucking screen!

Who is unethical?

Since the ad is using my bandwidth and using my kit to be seen it is a guest on my kit. If the ad industry acted like they are guests on users' kit they might not have a the problem they are facing. I suspect most posters on El-Reg use ad-blockers but are not vehemently anti-advertising. What many object to is ramming Flash and script ads that often contain malware down our throats. Hence, the nuclear option of total ad-blocking. The lack of ethics is with the ad industry, clean up your act first, then we will consider removing ad-blockers, etc.

The case for ethical ad blocking

Now the real question is whether Andrew here means ethical-ad blocking, or ethical ad-blocking.

I block all ads because they're demonstrably dangerous. Ad serving businesses have notoriously lax security and you can find perfectly innocent pages serving up malware through their ads as a result. Even when not explicitly designed to harm you, ads are overly intrusive and attempt to track you against your wishes. They're also obnoxious, especially video ads that auto play with the audio turned up.

I'll consider ditching ad blockers when the advertising industry get their act together. Until then, I'll just block everything (and stop using sites that insist I turn the ad blocker off)