[jkhaxxe]

So? Perhaps they would also like to block the ads at the server side, and save themselves the bill?

But more seriously, I don't care about their bills. They're delivering HTML over an open network connection - what I do with that HTML is entirely up to me. If they don't like that there's nothing they can do about it.

[sdoering]

Greetings,

> I don't care about their bills

[sarcasm] How farsighted. Oh how very farsighted. [sarcasm off]

So you really do not care about their service being shut down, because it could not pay for itself? I mean, people working there to produce content, hardware to run the service, bandwidth, and so on...

[ordinary]

The business model of websites supported by advertising is roughly as follows: I send you a bunch of data, and I hope that you parse, interpret, execute, display that data in a particular way. Some of that will be useful to you (interesting stuff) and some of that will be useful to me (ad impressions).

Apparently, many people are not comfortable with that kind of exchange. However, people being people, they still want to see the interesting stuff. So what do they do, they install this (free!) ad blocker that gets rid of all the things that are not immediately useful to them. Unethical? Possibly. But not illegal, and not even widely frowned upon.

So at this point, as a businessperson, I must ask myself whether my business model is still viable. If not, I must change it. That's what it means to be an entrepreneur: find ways to turn labour into money. Under Western democracies, I have that right, subject to laws and regulations. What I do not have is the right to having my particular business model be forever profitable.

This is a concept that the music, movie and game industries refused to wrap their head around. Their model was (and largely still is) "I give you these plastic things with bits on them and you give me money". This was acceptable to consumers as long as the plastic was required in order to be able to distribute bits. When this ceased to be the case, the business model started to fail. Rather than move to a different model (which, I realise, I make sound much easier than it is), they held onto the failing one, introducing complicated and fail-prone systems to prevent people from separating the bits from the plastic, in the process alienating their customers by making it harder and hard to actually use their products.

So, no, I don't feel bad when your business fails because of ad blocking. Being a selfish jerk, I'm upset you no longer send me interesting stuff. Being a compassionate human being, I'm sad a bunch of people lose their source of income. But this is the free market. If your business fails, you did something wrong. Someone else will come along and do it right.

[sp332]

That's like arguing against cars because it will put the horse-carriage makers out of business. Websites should switch to a sustainable busniess model (if ads aren't cutting it). My internet is nicer without ads, so I don't bother downloading them.

[jkhaxxe]

I really don't care. I'm just not going to look at any adverts.

[king_jester]

Why should the end user care and worry about a site's ability to sustain its revenue through advertisements? Users who are invested in a site are the kind of users that will do things that make that site more valuable, whether its community interaction or paying for the service.