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

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.

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?

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.

I TiVO things for the luxury of not having to mute commercials and wait for them to be over.

That said, I don't think that adblocking is akin to stealing. As a viewer/consumer, I have a choice, and my choice is to not be bombarded with advertisement when I just want to read a web site.

Now, I don't mind static ads (picture with a link) and sometimes click on them. And animated GIF ads I can right-click to kill "loop" and then "rewind" if I want to hang onto the site (as a tabbed occurence).

I HATE FLASH ADS - these cannot be stopped/paused, and some use an amazing amount of CPU and video-card time. At least they seem to have changed the "default" option -- perhaps never implemented, but there in the right-click menu -- to turn on your webcam, if you have one.

pft.

I actually have a VCR that will do this. There was coding on the original ReplayTV that would do this as well, which was of a great amount of concern to the networks when it was released, and the feature disappeared in subsequent releases.

Of course, that is all moot now. You can pay a $1.99 premium on a show from the iTunes music store and not have commercials. Or you can bit torrent it for nothing only a little bit after it airs. The latter sounds like networks should hate it, but honestly I think it serves as great marketing to sell DVDs. I don't know how that necessarily translates for web sites aside from website authors becoming book authors and using their web sites as the initial place to market themselves and get people reading their writing.

@RAnnieB - I can see your point from a marketer's perspective. It's very cogent and logical, actually.

@Chris Shaffer - Right now, the percentage of people who use ad block is still small as compared to the rest of the general Internet users.

That percentage would probably not change much in the future - the demise of ad-supported content has been predicted many times in the past, and it's still the most viable business method today.

What I learned from this discussion is how people who use ad block view their use of the plugin: it's like they feel it's their right to block ads.

This is fundamentally different from how I view things: if I'm not happy with a service (i.e. ad-supported content), then it's my right not to frequent that establishment (i.e. not visit the website), but it's not my right to use the service anyway and subvert payment to that service (i.e. visit the website, get the content, then ad block the ads).

As I've said above, I certainly have done nothing to stop delivering content to people who block Neatorama's ads.

I have, however, learned a lot about people's views on ads.

If it's a pretend game or one of those gawdawful "dress your zwinky" ads, I just shut it out.

What the hell is a zwinky, anyway?

Never mind. I don't need to know.

Also, end-users do pay for bandwidth, contrary to your statement above. In fact, many users on the Internet do not have unlimited bandwidth, and pay as they go. The people who happen to have "unlimited" bandwidth connections are also paying for bandwidth -- it's not like the 'unlimited' part is free. I pay my ISP for bandwidth, and they provide it to me. It's not free to them, and it's not free to me.

However I can sympathize with bloggers who work hard and have advertising as a major income source.

However, if you think about it, this business model (with or without ad blockers) is not viable as a long term one. You just can't force anyone to buy something with even a mildly irritating ad. Technology is now, and will progressively more, allow marketers to know precisely what ads generate what revenue (which was not possible in the past). Companies just won't pay for ads that don't generate sales.

Hence I predict that, in the future, blogs will feature ads that will be more ''interesting'' to viewers and may, in some cases, become part of the content (techno blogs already know this). Blogs will also diversify the way they generate income.

Aside from selling merchandise I see more and more blogs compiling their top posts and selling them to their readers for a nominal fee. It allows readers to feel like they're contributing to the longevity of their favourite blogs on a voluntary basis.

With all the serious brain power out there in blog world it's only a matter of time before more robust business models come out and readers don’t' need to feel like thieves for behaving rationally.

I disagree with your analogy - as I've said before, I don't think any webmaster would have any problem if you avert your eyes, ignore the ads, etc. You can go to the bathroom during TV commercial breaks, turn down the volume, change channels. You can ignore ads in your newspaper. No problem.

The problem with ad blocking is that it's an automated way to circumvent ads from loading. It's like a device that automatically skips ads on TV, or blanks out ads in a newspaper (okay, no such thing exist for newspaper, but you get the point).

Those of us who have worked on computers since the days of Arpanet and the early days of the Internet HATE ads with a passion.

My response then:
I love this bit: "As we all know users are becoming more and more banner/ad blind and no one more so than the tech/geek crowd which is the primary audience of Digg."

So, technically, the digg traffic and web block is irrelevant. It's the TYPE of user that's the problem. i.e. higher intelligence than a slug users. People who can simply ignore ads are bad customers. Digg has nothing to do with it, it's just a nice example to use. Could have been Reddit, or maybe evil Firefox users that have peripheral vision distraction issues and like to use Flashblock and Adblock to help with that.

They should just dumb down the content some if they are concerned about it. Start pushing the stuff grandma will enjoy. Get the less tech savvy crowd to be the audience instead of generating content that people who can block and ignore ads might possibly read.

Isn't one of the most important rules of writing "Know your audience."?

@Scotchdrnkr
This background noise is actually what bothers me; first of all the world as it is today is noisy enough (in fact much too noisy to be healthy); not necessary to have more of it. And for the background noise: Where do you think that goes? Yep that's right; straight into your sub-conscious. Even though you didn't click that ad and ignored it the message was delivered. You have seen the logo whether you want it or not. And that will affect your behaviour in some tiny way or another (Just don't you think all those marketing folks along with the specialised psychologists and other scientists trying to find more sophisticated ways to get you to do what the corporate bigwigs want are there for show or fun...). And that is the point I really don't like (in fact despise). I don't like people to try to manipulate me into their scheme. Thus I think it's morally ok to block the most obnoxious ads without remorse.