LogFAQs > #973445685

"People keep blocking our ads because they're annoying, disruptive, and sometimes downright harmful!"
"Maybe we should try to make them less annoying, disruptive, and sometimes downright harmful?"
"That's stupid, let's just make them even more intrusive so they work better on the remaining people while we figure out how to break the adblockers!"

And so the world turns...

Judgmenl posted...

Ad blocking is not piracy lmfao.
I just lost a lot of respect for you with that comment PO.

Man, it's a good thing the paragraph containing that comment didn't additional sentences in it that explained the analogy in ways that made it obvious that he was not in any way trying to suggest that adblocking is piracy, otherwise you'd look pretty silly right now.

That aside, there is a case to be made that it is. Ad-supported content creators rely on those ads being seen to make money creating their content. In a sense, viewing the ads is the medium by which viewers pay for the content they're consuming, so if you block the ads, you're consuming the content without paying the indicated price. That definitely gets muddied a bit by the number of intermediaries between viewing the ad and paying the creator, as well as by the fact that advertisers know full well that the majority of people viewing a given ad won't go out and buy the product either way and have already taken that probability into account in deciding how much the ad slot is worth, but the core concept of consuming the product/service without paying the requested price still applies. Of course, it's also much easier to justify because the actual monetary component of that price that goes to the creator is so minuscule compared to the time, annoyance, and potential damage the viewer experiences, so it stands to reason that, even if we do call it piracy, it falls into the ream of morally acceptable piracy for most people. Still, the argument can easily be made.