Are Ad Blockers Thieves?

Michael Alan Miller wrote an interesting post in his blog about ad blocking - and why he doesn't consider this "stealing":

Look, when I visit your website, I didn’t sign any contract that says I have to do anything in particular. I am in no way obligated to view your obnoxious ads. I understand completely that your website, like many others, depends on ads for revenue. I don’t care. I have no interest in being marketed to, cajoled into consumerism, insulted by unexpected sounds, and otherwise annoyed by asinine affixations found on your page.

If there were some way to fund deserving website by micropayments, I’d gladly sign up for that. For example, if I were charged $0.02 every time I visited Ars Technica (one of the worst whiners, link goes to a comment of one of the prime whiners), I’d sign up for this in a heartbeat. Why micropayments haven’t taken off yet, I have no idea, as ads are just not a good model for most of the Internet. Don’t get me wrong; I do want to support sites that I like. I learn much from them, and depend on them for many things in my life. However, I will not view ads, ever, if I can help it.

Do you think blocking ads is equivalent to thievery?

http://www.michaelalanmiller.com/?p=128 - via reddit (interesting sets of comments there as well)


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in my humble opinion --

1. i have no legal, ethical or moral responsibility to read/watch/listen to any advertisement.

2. technology that enables me to block ads is in principle no different from me ignoring ads by other means. using the fast forward in my TiVo is no different from me going to the bathroom during commercial breaks -- they both serve my purpose of avoiding ads, albeit the technology is inherently more effective, accurate and efficient at the task
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Online ads complaint center.

Each ads has a number that identify witch publicity company ( Or individual ) made the ad. Right click and select the option to get the number of the ad. Go to the Online ads complaint center and type in that number.

These ads wont opportunate you anymore ever again.

This should be a service made available by all the internet provider company since they're the ones secretly benefiting from users losing half their time closing anoying pop-ups or whatever ads you can think about online.

I pay for this service called the internet but this is not what I payed for.
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If they make their ads small, easy to view and non obstructive then it's alright with me.

If they make their ads a big animated thigny in the middle of what i'm looking, accidently scroll over and video start, publicity over video i'm currently watching or any of those annoying marketing scam ads then I just boycot the product or service for as long as I can remember the annoying ads.

Last night I was checking some game reviews on IGN and there was a cute little video publicity just in the center of the review ( not obstruing anything ) of some upcomming game I actually clicked on it to learn more and watched the previews. T'was fun and now i'm thinking about buying a nintendo DS.

Now for that other ad that kept on appearing each time I wanted to check the features of a game ( I was trying to find how many PS2 games had online capability ) about a movie by Jet Li... it made me regret going to the theater to watch that other Jet Li movie years ago.

There's a good way to do it and a bad way to do it. They should seriously think about making some online complain center for annoying ads because I dont even know if most of those ads are actually made by the people who want you to buy their product or service or competitors... would be a good way to trash the competition, just make annoying ads for your competitors... who's going to know it's not them?
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All I know is that my tests with Firefox 3.0 beta went fine except for the lack of the Adblock plugin. Holy crap, what a difference that made to my browsing experience. Thankfully the plugin is now available for the firefox beta.
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"I HATE FLASH ADS - these cannot be stopped/paused, and some use an amazing amount of CPU and video-card time."

There are flash stopping plugins for Firefox, look on mozilla's site in the addons/plugins section. You don't have to see flash unless you want to.
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