If your server sends bits back to my computer when I request them, it is perfectly within my right to decide which of those bits I do and do not want to see.
This is like the people who say they can say what they want because of free speech.
If you're able to justify something because of a technicality and are intentionally ignoring the ethics of the situation and what is clearly right/wrong... well, that's not a good look.
If ad networks would behave ethically, I would agree with you. But they don't, so I don't.
It's not all black and white. If you want to charge me for content, charge me for content. If I think it's worth it, I'll pay. Don't force an unusable, emotionally-manipulative, probably malware-filled experience on me from the get-go because you don't otherwise have a sustainable business model.
You’re getting something you value (video, article, etc.) in exchange for looking at ads instead of paying money. If you don’t want to look at ads, don’t look at the content. Don’t hide behind server requests and technicalities.
It would be fine in the 1995 version of the internet where a page served up content plus a banner ad. I might click, I might not. But now we're faced with privacy invasion, tracking, data-collection, TVs that output tones during ads that our phones pick up and report back to advertisers, pages that are slow and unreadable because the ads have taken over more real estate than the content. The list goes on, and it's not a trade we agreed to.
Anti-patterns designed to trick us into clicking, signing up, giving up more data, view another few seconds of ads. It never ends! So yeah, we block it. I don't feel sorry. If you don't think it's ethical then you're not paying attention to what's really going on. I used to go around installing Firefox for people before it was called that. Then adblockers, and now I go to people's houses and help them with a raspberry pi loaded with pi-hole. Fuck ads. Fuck that entire industry. And fuck everyone that works in that industry enabling them.
Yes, it’s fine to skip ads in magazines or change the channel during commercials.
It’s not OK to get a robot that changes the channel for you or to have your magazines sent to a service who cuts the ads out and forwards them on to you.
You're setting arbitrary restrictions based on some feel-good criterion you've developed for yourself.
The implication of your ethical argument was that avoiding ads causes the content creator to fail to get paid, and that's wrong.
There's no material difference between whether I avoid ads manually, or have software do it for me automatically. The end result is the same; the creator misses out on ad revenue. You can't cherry-pick the ad avoidance methods and say some are ethical and some are not when the supposed unethical act is depriving creators of payment.
If you're able to justify something because of a technicality and are intentionally ignoring the ethics of the situation and what is clearly right/wrong... well, that's not a good look.