Most free web sites pay for their upkeep with ads. It has been an unwritten agreement since forever (or at least as long as there have been ads on the web) that if you consume the content, you pay the creator by looking at the ads on their site.
Consuming the content without looking at the ads is like shoplifting because you don’t like the way a store’s checkout counter works and/or the fact that they want money from you at all.
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Counterpoint: The checkout counter at the store doesn’t follow me out into the parking lot, grab my license place number and sell it to whoever wants it, or follow me into other stores.
Definitely an unpopular opinion, though! Take my upvote.
They may grab your payment info though, and use it to build a profile of you that tracks your spending habits to share with others.
Source: was one of the people whose cards had been compromised by the massive data breach Target had about a decade or so ago, because Target had been saving payment information on every customer to build profiles from.
Now I think the newer chip-based cards and tap to pay have made it harder to track customers, but that’s basically why every company is trying to push its own app these days.
- you pay the content creator by buying their content, not by browsing ads on their site – ads are a really annoying tip jar being waved in your face when you’re trying to hand money to the cash register
- advertisers have been given plenty of warning to behave themselves and they refuse, they are parasitic leeches bleeding both creator and purchaser
- adblockers are the effect, not the cause
- original websites were ad free
- banner ads were added and we tolerated them
- advertisers then added in distracting flashing effects, loud audio cues, broke security with Flash, broke accessibility
- adblockers invented
- advertisers shed crocodile tears and pretend to be contrite
- advertisers start pushing tracking, malware, phishing, crypto-miners
- adblockers are now as important as antivirus for the safety of your computer/tablet/phone
Theft?
Methinks you don’t know the definition of the words you use.
Even if it is - fuck 'em. 99% of websites use invasive scripting to track us, and they’re clearly adversarial to us. Just read up on what Facebook has always done…think they’re the only ones?
Website owners had a chance in the late 90’s to treat users/consumers with respect, and chose to say “fuck you” instead, and since have doubled down on their attitude towards us.
Fine. You wanna play that way? I’ll teach everyone I know how to use ad blockers and tools like DNS filters. I’ll never buy something directly through your website, etc.
If you want to call ad blocking theft, then the delivery of ads is theft of my bandwidth, cpu time (electricity), and the invasive scripting/tracking is theft of my personal info.
How many boots do you lick in a day?
Do you read every billboard on the road? After all they’ve paid for that patch of sky, what obligation do you have to glance that way without paying them the courtesy of processing their inane drivel. Ever see the same ad more than once? Me neither. Every time I see an ad, like a stupid, happy cow, I am entertained once again.
I have (no kidding) taken u-turns to see an interesting billboard. Anyway, the analogy is flawed: You still see the billboard, even if you don’t read all of it - just like I see the ad, but may not really read it.
You ever hear the term “born sucker”?
Ever hear of "Can’t read half a sentence without
Unpopular indeed.
Upvoted for unpopular and for making clear, legitimate points in favour.
That said, I partially agree. Serving content costs money, as does investigating, reporting and writing it. Paywalls are the Black Death of the Internet, so what else remains? A creator fee as provided by Brave in the past was nice but didn’t work. Donations are scarce, small and unreliable. Advertising has proven to work well for old school newspapers and magazines, so it’s an understandable choice.
However, from advertising it escalated extremely quickly into the Stasi-inspired tracking-snooping-profiling fuckfest it has become, not taking into account the disgusting ad-to-content ratio, pop-ups, pop-overs and yes, pop-unders, flashing banners, animated swf banners and the abuse of the ad markets by malware and espionage groups.
And I too, Gandalf, I was there, 3000 years ago, when my wizard wrote the OSF1 binaries on the securely aligned platters of oulde.
It has been an unwritten agreement since forever (or at least as long as there have been ads on the web) that if you consume the content, you pay the creator by looking at the ads on their site.
Downvoted because this is objectively wrong.
I’ve been using the internet since the mid 90s, and there were very few ads then. The ads that did exist were mainly banner ads pointing to other sites, for example. Ad companies got wise to them and started posting their own ads, then started using invasive technology like popup ads and animated ads.
From the first time these types of ads were used, there have been complaints against them, and adblockers were developed.
At no point did I agree to view ads on the internet, and the vast majority of people only put up with them because they don’t know that there’s a way to get rid of them.
I’ve been on the web since my college installed Mosaic on their HP-UX machines. I wanna say summer of '94. Thus, I can honestly say that I’ve seen it before the first commercial banner ad was sold later that year. I actually thought ad were worse in the early 2000’s than they are now. Flash should never have been used for that, for example. My main problem with ads these days is that there are sites where the signal/noise ratio is just ridiculously bad. In those cases, I vote with my feet and stay away.
Using ads is theft (of my precious lifetime).
