One of my favorite blogs as of late (Get Rich Slowly) has an interesting post on his site's use advertisements. It explains how they serve as motivation for his writing and how he hates when there are "get rich quickly" type ones on his site. Both points are quite logical, but it was the comments that got me thinking.
joshua Says:
"Sorry JD, but like many (most?) Firefox users, I have adblock plus installed, with a full community driven filter list installed, so I don't see any ads on your site."
My first thought was: "I'm with him," I haven't seen an ad on GRS since I started reading it a few months ago. That thought sent me on an ugly tangent though.
A lot of websites pay for their bandwidth with advertising. An increasing number are professional bloggers who rely on sponsors for their bread, butter and AMD Barton processors. Does that mean that I'm stealing content by automatically blocking just about every advertisement on the internet?
What do you think?
posted by Chad at 9:07 AMWednesday, November 22, 2006
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Posted at 11/24/2006 10:59 PM | By Andrew
- Personally I don't think its stealing. There's no contract, implicit or otherwise, when I visit a site that I must view their advertisements.
If we're smart enough to circumvent their passive advertising approach, then the burden is on the advertisers to figure out a better way.
Posted at 11/24/2006 11:54 PM | By Chad
- I still rather torn on the issue. On one hand it is an ethical dilemma, and on the other I just don't want to deal with most of them. I never click on advertisements anyway and rarely look at them (in the rare case they happen to be visible). What difference does it make if I see them or not?
... and I hope that they don't come up some kind of active advertising.
Obviously my motivation for this was not based ethically but merely on the fact that Windows Live Mail detected when its ad frames were missing and wouldn't load. However I've since contemplated the ethics of it mainly because of my heavy use of Newsvine, where I am actually getting paid (a little) for the ads that my column serves to others. I tried to justify it with I wouldn't be affected by the advertisements anyway, but I found that not to be the case. When I'm at work I have to use Internet Explorer, so I see the ads, and I definitely am impacted by what I see in the advertisements--I know I remember them. However, I don't know if I could bear to just turn off Adblock. There are just too many annoying ads out there that detract from the web experience.
It's a bit like being accused of stealing when watching a movie, actually.