With respect, this is not near the ethical issue it is portrayed as. That boojum has been raised by the advertisers themselves.
The agreements are between the advertisers and the web site and do not affect me. I choose not to see ads because they are 99% useless and the rest are offensive, annoying, intrusive or actively dangerous in tracking my actions on the web.
I cannot recall the last time I was motivated to buy something based in an ad I have seen therefore they are a waste of my time and I need not bother with them. The web site gains nothing from my having seen them, the advertisers gains nothing from my having seen them so again, there is no ethics issue.
By this fraudulent logic, I should look over every ad in a magazine I bought. I assure you I do not. Am I then a âthiefâ as several advertising executives like to call people who use ad-blockers or fast forward through recorded video? (I almost never watch live as the ads are increasingly obtrusive)
For every 1 ad that might actually have something relevant, there are 10,000 ads telling me the President wants me to refinance my house while saving money on my car insurance, jiggling women dancing across the screen telling me one weird trick to lose belly fat and endless variations on this nonsense.
Nope, the ethics do not involve the end user at all, at least not until the web sites and advertisers stop pasting garbage across the screen at every turn.
Our host could recognize their inherent bias and recuse themselves instead of further squandering the little remaining credibility they have with pseudo-moralistic insinuations.
If they donât watch out, we tech-literate yuppie types might find a new echo chamber elsewhere.
I donât really mind ads as such all that much. Until fairly recently I didnât even use ad blocking although I had Flash set to click-to-play. I only started on one machine when my netbook (remember those?) froze too often on too many sites after some Firefox update.
Thank God most sites have learned that users hate too much overt disruption and moved away from pop-ups, pop-unders, autoplaying sound etc. Unfortunately anything goes when it comes to less obvious problems.
Perhaps ethical advertising really doesnât work, but I am still not sure. Is it really impossible to have ad providers that commit to firm public standards covering content, privacy, transparency, performance impact, security etc.? That would allow users to feel confident whitelisting whole ad providers across all sites.
You can opt-out of that of course by unchecking the box but i agree, itâs why i switched to ublock origin (not ublock) after being a long time user of adblock plus but receiving payments for inclusion on a whitelist? Iâm not down with that. Anyone else use ublock origin? Itâs not as user friendly and iâm still a bit mystified over its dynamic filtering.
Ethical Ad blocker. User pays X dollars a year. Sites sign up for Adblocker network. Adblocker pays per page load similar to Pandora or Spotify Or perhaps per unique viewer. Site gets paid, user never has ads loaded, people who canât afford or wonât pay X per year see ads, or get a different ad blocker. Google is perfectly positioned to be this adblocker. Have it be an add-on to my Google Drive/etc account. While logged in, no Google ads run. Or maybe tiers. Google Shopping ads show, but not search result ads. Iâd pay $5/year for a YouTube account that doesnât put banners over the video. Prerolls are annoying, but not being able to see he content for the ads is just awful.
However, itâs my computer, I should have the ability to control what goes into it. All ad blockers are ethical from that point of view.
I would have no problem with truly targeted and interesting ads.
Sadly, the products and services Iâm most interested in already devote their limited marketing budget to targeted ads that arenât broadcast on every conceivable website through the ad network brokers.
One of the things that irks me about ads, especially in video form on youtube is that they often times will load at a higher resolution than i desire. Which eats up my data for the month, which is something i pay for and not the advertiser. I hardly find ads killing a portion of my data for the month when i donât want to see them in the first place as ethical.
You forgot how the movie industry collapsed in the late 80s as everyone stopped going to movie theaters in favor of using those newfangled Video-Tape Machines to copy movies off of HBO
I just didnât want to pull any punches in regards to @boingboing. They donât get a free pass from criticism just for hosting this conversation.
Itâs really sleazy to claim that we as consumers have an moral obligation to support a struggling business model.
Internet advertising is broken, ad block is nothing more than the reasonable response to an unreasonable assault on limited attention span, processing power, and credulity.
