[throwaway123531]

That's shortsighted. There is only so much money in the system. People who use content blockers usually don't buy stuff in response to ads.

Ad blocking users won't reduce the entire ad revenue that is flowing through the system.

From the perspective of a company this is different of course - a company can increase revenue by maximizing the number of ads shown to users. But when you look at it from the perspective of the entire system, the more users are forced to view ads, the less valuable an ad becomes, so it's a race to the bottom.

The biggest problem is that ads are the wrong solution. In earlier times, many services that operate for free now were primarily paid services - paid voluntarily, which is based on respect and human dignity. And the ads were just printed in paper form, so there was a limit to how much money you could extract out of it. Ads had their place, but were limited in their scope. Publishers of paper newspapers would have never thought to maximize revenue by forcing users to actually look at an ad, because there was no technical way to do it. Now they think they are entitled to be intrusive, and to control user behavior while legally giving away something for free without any legal obligation for readers to return anything. So those who benefit from ads resort to moral pressure.

They have developed feedback systems, and the feedback systems are carefully designed to extract as much money out of people with no regard for anything else, which is dehumanizing, and this means ads (like all systems that use psychology to manipulate behavior) are actively destroying what makes us human.

They will only stop once the ad system has been dried out, and when that happens we finally may get meaningful content and journalism again.

[charcircuit]

>People who use content blockers usually don't buy stuff in response to ads.

This is not true at all.

>Ad blocking users won't reduce the entire ad revenue that is flowing through the system.

Yes, they do. There is a reason why sites try and bypass adblockers. It's not because they are evil and want people to have a worse user experience. It's because they can earn money by actually showing them ads.

[wincy]

I block ads aggressively for me and my children. Only use PLEX, no streaming services, adblockers everywhere. I get upset when I see ads. My children get confused and cry. But you’re right. When my daughter was in the hospital with pneumonia and seeing ads were unavoidable, she saw a Paw Patrol ad about a million times and started crying for some $50 toy. Finally I bought it so she’d shut up. It works on me too, I see an ad for some new 3D printer and want to spend $500 on it. Or maybe I will pay $10 a month for a subscription until the end of time for STL files I think are cool but will never print.

They already have thousands of toys, and I have multiple printers that fulfill my needs, but the ads keep encouraging me. Maybe I will charge my credit card to get this very well engineered 3D printer part. Maybe the kids do need more toys.

Of course they can make money off of showing me ads. Advertising is where you take the best minds in the world and waste their skill on the most nefarious and toxic type of manipulation that exists. One time my 300 pound fat ass almost spent $60 on edible cookie dough because of a Facebook ad. I pulled the page up a dozen times and almost clicked “buy” a few times.

My mind is constantly assaulted by nonsense. I hate advertisements as much as I hate the people who ignore the “no solicitors - oxygen” sign the children’s hospital gave us, and knock on my door anyway.

[kelnos]

I don't see either of you providing any evidence for your claims.

I think it's unlikely that no person who uses an ad blocker wouldn't occasionally click an ad and buy something. But what's the percentage? Is it something small, like 5%, or more like 25%? The grandparent's point about all of this being dehumanizing really resonated with me. At what percentage does it become justified to dehumanize people for revenue?

My opinion is that advertising is emotional manipulation, and is by its very nature unethical. No, that doesn't mean that no one ever has benefited from buying a product that they wouldn't have known about without advertising, but my belief is that the overwhelming majority of ads serve the purpose of causing people to buy things that a) they would have bought anyway (so the ad just wasted their time), or b) they would have gotten along without just fine (so the ad manipulated them into spending money they didn't need to spend).

I ad block at several levels on my laptop and network. I will never, ever click on an ad and buy something. My situation may not be universal among ad-blocking users, but I doubt I'm part of a small minority either.