| There's a strange note of entitlement that seems to pop up whenever discussions about ad blocking arise. It smacks of the piracy argument, "if producers didn't make it so difficult to consume the content, I wouldn't pirate it." The argument isn't about whether or not it's theft, so much as whether or not consumers agree with the method and constraints on the intersection between distribution and consumption. In the case of 'free' content on the web: site 'owners' create and serve content, often via paid servers with labor overhead in the form of creation, curation, programming infrastructure/support, sysadmins, and so forth. The server sits in one or more datacenters, waiting for requests. Let's use the house metaphor: say I create a website, www.thisismyhouse.com and you like the content, so you visit my (open) house. My house has certain conventions, social compacts, if you will. You don't enter without some sense that there are obligations on both sides: if I am an irritating host, you don't stay and eat my food, you leave. If you are an irritating guest, you are escorted out. At no time in the physical world is there a situation where you can use technology to mute the host while still eating the food (aside from <insert dated in-laws joke here> ). "Oho!" someone exclaims, "I spent fuel and time" (internet bandwidth) "to visit your house! This cost me (unit of value) too!" So we agree that both sides have a monetary/value stake in this transaction. But there are rules, folks. The content isn't free and never was. Just because you can line up at the buffet and filter out the environment until it meets your requirements through technology doesn't mean that you have an ongoing right to keep visiting (consuming). Free content sites are like trialware: you visit, decide if you like it, then pay if you keep using it, and the price is set by the author (ads, subscriptions, you name it). If you don't like the price, you don't get to keep eating your fill. I'm not a fan of ads, but I accept them as by and large the price of admission to the content I like. There are plenty of ways to get around tracking without fully blocking ads, so that doesn't really concern me). If the ads are just too much, I go elsewhere. How complicated is that? |