In my opinion blocking advertisements online is piracy due to the ads cannot be viewed, therefore the site will lose money. Sites will use the money they make to pay for servers, upgrading web servers , spend money on themselves and other things. There are ad networks who will pay for so many views of the ad and clicks. If the site does not make money than their content, programming and severs do not get paid for. If you go to a store and steal a magazine that’s stealing. If you steal a magazine the writers and editors do not get paid for their content and cost to print to put on store shelfs.
Now you may say not everyone blocks ads or steals magazines but it still takes away money from the business.I believe blocking Ads is just as bad as illegally downloading Music, software or a movie. When you buy a song, software or a movie your paying to be allowed to play or use that media. Cloud Application and Websites like the one your on now does not cost the user anything up front to be allowed to use it, the service is paid for by the ads. So I think blocking ads is the same as not paying for your movie, song or software. Now I do believe ad blocking is okay if the reason to block Abusive ads. I don’t think a site should be allowed to profit from abusing the consumer.
I would define Abusive ads if they have viruses, malware, key loggers or any way harmful to you or your computer. I also would say ads with audio that plays by default and with runtimes like Adobe Flash or Java would fit in the abusive ads category. Java applets are kinda slow on loading it seems. Flash can not be so great with Battery life on mobile platforms. Runtimes aren’t really part of the web itself since it’s a plug-in. I believe ads should be images, text or html5. I think good ads are one they don’t force you to see then wait a few seconds to see content and ads that don’t obstruct the view of the content on the site itself. I do hope that ad companies and maybe government will set a standard on ads so people will not need to block ads.
So in this blog post I think I looked at it from both Business and consumer point of view. To summarize I as an entrepreneur would like money and I as a consumer would want ads that don’t annoy me or will hurt my computer. I don’t know if ad blocking is illegal but my opinion of it is that is stealing. Other people may have other opinions on this subject, so maybe you can comment to try to shape my opinion if you do not agree. You are entitled to your own opinion.
