[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.