Yes, it's a good way for them to bombard people who aren't sufficiently annoyed by ads to actually look for ways to block them with messages telling them they should be. They already "empowered" people to choose an ad-free internet by building the app; people that want it download it. Why exactly isn't it equally obnoxious and irritating for AdBlock to follow everyone else round the internet trying to change their behaviour? Or is their rationale that advertising serves the legitimate purpose of informing users about choices they may not realize they have?
Either way, I'm baffled by the whole exercise, and I have Adblock installed on my primary browser.
Still, the Kickstarter campaign is a great guerilla ad for the Scouter app...
Luckily for you then, since you already have AdBlock installed, you won't see the adverts.
Or is their rationale that advertising serves the legitimate purpose of informing users about choices they may not realize they have?
Exactly. Believe or not, most people on HN are computer savvy. There are some users who are not aware of AdBlock. Personally I have installed it on a number of friends and family computers, and guess what, it has reduced the amount of adware and malware they install.
> Luckily for you then, since you already have AdBlock installed, you won't see the adverts.
Actually, AdBlock is making the new ad appear to those who have AdBlock installed -- I just saw my AdBlock icon light up and, when clicked, display this ad:
Actually, AdBlock is making the new ad appear to those who have AdBlock installed
I saw the same thing, but that's not exactly the same thing as seeing ads, they're not (AFAIK) only showing AdBlock ads... they're informing you of something they are implementing in a hidden way.
If you really take offence to what they are doing then you (and not directed at you per se)
- Uninstall AdBlock
- View ads on websites, maybe click on them occasionally so click-through rates increase
- Install Adblock Plus, because it's not the ad blocking that you are specifically against, just the fact they are advertising
The point is, you have options, and they are presenting options to potential users. This is how things work in a free-market economy. We're not living under a totally facist regime just yet...
> I saw the same thing, but that's not exactly the same thing as seeing ads, they're not (AFAIK) only showing AdBlock ads... they're informing you of something they are implementing in a hidden way.
I think it counts as an advertisement, and I'm not complaining, only observing. I just thought there was more than a touch of irony in AdBlock showing an ad within the AdBlock app.
> We're not living under a totally facist regime just yet...
Interesting comparison. A regime that forced us to watch ads could be described as Fascist, as could one that blocked all ads regardless of people's tastes. Anything that prevented free choice.
I don't think the irony is missed on anyone, no doubt the AdBlock guys them themselves... and the ability to watch or not watch ads is not the point I was making. The point is we have a choice of whether to use or not use, either Adblock, AdBlock plus, something else or nothing at all. But more so, the general state of the web and the big brother on everything. It's a slippery slope :)
> But more so, the general state of the web and the big brother on everything. It's a slippery slope :)
I couldn't agree more. I was posting on Usenet before there was a Web, so I've seen the entire sequence of events. Rather depressing overall. But it could be worse -- we could be hunted down and killed for expressing dissent, for protesting, for supporting unpopular causes. When I say this, I'm thinking of this man:
This man, this doctor, was an activist against unscientific quackery. He became too well-known and too effective, so his enemies hired a hit squad. And this was in India, a country and people that revere democracy and free speech.
To be effective, the adverts need to be the most obnoxious, loudest, gaudiest and intrusive designs possible :)
For extra points, they should flaunt their privacy invading features, e.g. follow you around on all the sites you visit, cheerfully reminding you about the places you've been and how all the other advertisers are recording this too.
This makes a perfect sense actually. They want as much people as possible to use the extension so that more advertisers are forced to pay to adblock itself to allow the ads through. The ethics on the other hand on such a moves are questionable, since it makes ordinary advertising either obsolete or makes adblock the bottleneck of it's effectiveness.
Ethics? Ad blocking is facilitation of content stealing. Not one inch better than, say, a torrent site where the vast majority of torrents are copyrighted material.
Stealing was already incorrect when we were talking about copyright infringement, as the US Supreme Court has pointed out. It's definitively wrong when there's no copyright infringement at all.
Because I'm paying for the bandwidth, and because I'm there for the content, not the adverts, and because I can - it's my computer, I can decide what it does.
So? Perhaps they would also like to block the ads at the server side, and save themselves the bill?
But more seriously, I don't care about their bills. They're delivering HTML over an open network connection - what I do with that HTML is entirely up to me. If they don't like that there's nothing they can do about it.
[sarcasm] How farsighted. Oh how very farsighted. [sarcasm off]
So you really do not care about their service being shut down, because it could not pay for itself? I mean, people working there to produce content, hardware to run the service, bandwidth, and so on...
Why should the end user care and worry about a site's ability to sustain its revenue through advertisements? Users who are invested in a site are the kind of users that will do things that make that site more valuable, whether its community interaction or paying for the service.
The business model of websites supported by advertising is roughly as follows: I send you a bunch of data, and I hope that you parse, interpret, execute, display that data in a particular way. Some of that will be useful to you (interesting stuff) and some of that will be useful to me (ad impressions).
Apparently, many people are not comfortable with that kind of exchange. However, people being people, they still want to see the interesting stuff. So what do they do, they install this (free!) ad blocker that gets rid of all the things that are not immediately useful to them. Unethical? Possibly. But not illegal, and not even widely frowned upon.
So at this point, as a businessperson, I must ask myself whether my business model is still viable. If not, I must change it. That's what it means to be an entrepreneur: find ways to turn labour into money. Under Western democracies, I have that right, subject to laws and regulations. What I do not have is the right to having my particular business model be forever profitable.
This is a concept that the music, movie and game industries refused to wrap their head around. Their model was (and largely still is) "I give you these plastic things with bits on them and you give me money". This was acceptable to consumers as long as the plastic was required in order to be able to distribute bits. When this ceased to be the case, the business model started to fail. Rather than move to a different model (which, I realise, I make sound much easier than it is), they held onto the failing one, introducing complicated and fail-prone systems to prevent people from separating the bits from the plastic, in the process alienating their customers by making it harder and hard to actually use their products.
So, no, I don't feel bad when your business fails because of ad blocking. Being a selfish jerk, I'm upset you no longer send me interesting stuff. Being a compassionate human being, I'm sad a bunch of people lose their source of income. But this is the free market. If your business fails, you did something wrong. Someone else will come along and do it right.
That's like arguing against cars because it will put the horse-carriage makers out of business. Websites should switch to a sustainable busniess model (if ads aren't cutting it). My internet is nicer without ads, so I don't bother downloading them.
Actually, you are explicitly allowed to decide what the site does, insofar as display is concerned. If it's client-side, you can do what you want. And blocking ads does get people somewhere - a less annoying internet.
As for your analogy...again, you're allowed to do that.
Actaully, the HTML of the "newspaper" directs my browser to connect to a bunch of other sites to download the sales flyers separately. I simply decline to fetch the ads. It's not like the website "puts ads in" and I "cut them out".
I'm not sure that I qualify as 'sane,' but I do it to block tracking/breadcrumb JS. I don't want to pay extra cash for a flight because airlines know that I've been looking extensively over the last few hours.
You can also just use an Incognito tab (or similar in your browser). AdBlock alone may not be enough to keep you out of tracking for comparison shopping.
It's close enough to a solved problem and I want the web history. My machine fingerprint is hugely generic -- Chrome on OSX with a couple plugins coming from NYC. Advertisers/jerks could use the visited link color hack with first-party/same-origin JS, but nothing's perfect.
How likely would advertisers be to refuse to allow the Adblock ads?
I don't really have a problem with ads on websites, experienced users can easily block them, but I see no problem with providing ads for a free service.
Many organizations only have three methods to generate revenue, either show advertisements, have paid memberships, or take donations. Google shows advertisements, Apple has paid memberships, Wikipedia and Apache Foundation take donations. All three are great companies, they just have different ways to generate revenue. Many websites have no choice but to move towards an advertisements method to remain operational,
Adblock is trying to destroy that method of revenue and the online advertising market, it could destroy many great websites and companies that currently make money from advertising. While I'm not a huge fan of ads, they do serve a purpose, and destroying a harmless market such as online advertising without replacing it or supplementing it somehow isn't good. Plus if Adblock is actually successful and the online advertising industry collapses, then they will be putting themselves out of business.
> A free service putting itself out of business...
Are you suggesting a free service can't make enough money to operate a business? Man, how am I getting away with not paying for that Wikipedia subscription.
Adblock operates on donations and if it were to eliminate advertising, its current product would become useless.
I believe they meant that the ad companies are promoting a product that blocks the same ads they sell. If the promotion is successful, the ad company gets a short term win ($$) but a long term loss in ad views.
Maybe this is well-known, but my google-fu only turned up this news about Adblock Plus. Are you sure Adblock does it as well?
When I used adblock as the search criteria, I got a bunch of hits on it. But when I did adblock -plus, I got nothing primary that could pin this activity to AdBlock.
I completely agree. If I could reinvent adblock I would create it so only false ads would have been blocked. By that I mean false download buttons, fake iphone winnings, insert your phone number for iq test, etc...
That's not really the demand, except for a relatively small set of people who are savvy to the reasons why advertising exists and benefits big companies. It wouldn't be nearly as successful.
Adblock is trying to destroy that method of revenue and the online advertising market, it could destroy many great websites and companies that currently make money from advertising.
This is why native advertising is doing so well lately. Instead of having blockable ads surrounding your content, you subtly twist the content into being an ad of sorts. Ad blocking has helped fuel this and while it can be done well, it can also be done in a shady payola-esque way.. while being far harder to detect or block than regular ads.
Blocking ads is about as effective as banning abortions long-term. There's a non-shifting demand and it'll always find a way to express itself, whether in entirely legal ways or not.
I don't understand how ad-blocking is even legal. It's like stealing - stealing content for free, IMHO there's no difference between stealing MP3s and news or any other content. There's some kind of user agreement between websites and its users - "you can use our site for free, but you have to watch the ads". Adblock violates this agreement. The people responsible for this should be in prison, they're thieves. And I'm pretty sure the time will come they will.
> You still see absorb the advertisement passively.
Good thing I have control of my software and can opt out.
I'm already assaulted at the senses all day long in different forms. The whole concept of advertising I find abhorrent. A service should only offer itself to me when I want it, otherwise they are just imposing themselves and I will dislike them for that.
Any way that I can opt-out of ads I will make use of.
Services that rely on just this business model should adapt or fail, simply. If the service is relevant it will come again from a different source with a more acceptable model.
Do you feel that violating any user agreement should be illegal and those who do it "should be in prison"? Furthermore, where the user agreement isn't specifically given (eg a mandatory ToS), do you feel that any agreement the site owner can claim was implied (use the site for free, watch our ads) should be legally binding?
I'm also pretty sure that in most countries you actually have to agree to the ToS and ensure the user has read it. Just having a T&Cs page on your website somewhere does not count. Most websites don't force me to agree to anything before viewing their content... if that's part of the ToS then they need to make sure I agree to it.
That's a little extreme...there's no law against blocking advertisements. And you're not seeing this from the perspective of AdBlock users.
They don't give a shit. To them the ads are just annoying and they're getting rid of them. They don't even read TOS agreements, let alone agree to some implicit contract where advertisements are required.
Also: nitpick. The people who created adblock aren't thieves in the same way the founders of the Pirate Bay aren't necessarily pirates. They themselves aren't stealing anything, just mass-producing a method whereby it's possible (in your opinion). I'm not trying to argue semantics, but if they were charged for something, it wouldn't be thievery.
It's like a shopping a pantry store with a nasal smell blocker. How is that legal to block your nose while shopping here! It is stealing! Your logic is just perfect.
Blocking ads has deprived nobody of their property unless you believe that a site is owed the revenue from ad impressions from its visitors (it's not). This is the same line of thinking of the MPAA with regard to how it approaches licensing.
I run a site that makes its money from ads, and I personally have no problem with people blocking them. I figure the people blocking them are less likely to click anyways, so I'm not too concerned. Obviously it would be a problem if everyone blocked ads, but I think that is pretty far off.
Example: I only bother to block them on my main computer, but don't on my phone, desktop, etc. Your average Joe is unlikely to start doing so soon.
Ad blocking will not be a major problem until it becomes the default on a widely used browser. It takes about 30 seconds to block ads in a modern browser, and the majority of people don't do it.
I have a few questions for you: What if there is a more advanced Google-glass which has enough juice to detect real-life ads and ability to remove them from our display? If I read a magazine with it, would it be stealing? What if I just cut the ads before bringing the newspaper to my grandma, because she finds them distracting or just throw away the bundled magazine full of discount coupons and ads? What about tv recorders which automatically skip ads? When I take a coffee break instead of watching the ads, would I still be breaking the law? Can I put a paper on my display, where the ads on my favorite website appear? Should I just avoid those web-sites with ads when I'm using a text-only browser?
Yeah! Opting not to render the pixel configuration on your screen in the method suggested by the other end is a crime. So is using browsers with the graphics turned off, and being blind.
One of the issues with advertising or third party advertising networks comes down to security.
They have been and will continue to be the targets for malicious hackers who use them to serve malware to unsuspecting site visitors.
Until those ad networks are properly secured and monitored I will treat them as a security liability.
In many cases site admins go completely overboard with advertising creating a broken user experience. They choice you have then is to vote with your clicks and go elsewhere or attempt to use the site with an ad-blocker.
If any site admin wishes me to go elsewhere they can block users with ad blockers installed. If the site has value then they an ask POLITELY to whitelist their site; which for many sites I do add then to a site wide whitelist.
Assuming your site visitors of being thieves is not only stupid but illogical. If I walk past a billboard with my eyes close should I have them surgically removed because their are an adblocker? If I use a PVR to skip ads on TV am I stealing content? No; I am exercising a choice not to look at your pointless adverts.
The adverts add nothing to my experience of your site; I don't click on them so you won't be making any money from me for displaying them anyway.
Either find some other way to monetize your site (subs, sell merchandise, ask for donations etc) or find something else to do.
"""
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small.
They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it.
They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck That.
Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you.
They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
So you're telling me that you have never downloaded an MP3? A DivX or streamed a tv series from somewhere? Or skipped those adverts at the beginning of the DVDs? How about recorded something on a PVR and then fast-forwarded when it comes to commercial breaks?
Believe it or not, not everybody in the world gets to enjoy super fast internet connection speeds, cos they live in countries that are not so well developed or they are in very rural places. Why should they have to sit through waiting for irrelevant content to load? And the adverts are not relevant to them cos Google has no advertisers in their region? And they are on bandwidth capped plan so they are paying to see these adverts?
It's actually pretty trivial to detect AdBlock and make your site inaccessible unless the user disables it. I've seen a couple sites doing that in the wild. Sounds like a business opportunity...
Take away quotes -- "Seems to me like this is nothing more than a half-thought idea because they have nothing better to do and are jealous of AdBlock Plus taking bribes from ad companies to "white-list" them from being blocked."
"Want to have a real impact on advertising AdBlock? Do something that puts money in publisher bank accounts and gets advertisers results that's less obtrusive than the current state of affairs. Be creative.
84 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadEither way, I'm baffled by the whole exercise, and I have Adblock installed on my primary browser.
Still, the Kickstarter campaign is a great guerilla ad for the Scouter app...
Or is their rationale that advertising serves the legitimate purpose of informing users about choices they may not realize they have?
Exactly. Believe or not, most people on HN are computer savvy. There are some users who are not aware of AdBlock. Personally I have installed it on a number of friends and family computers, and guess what, it has reduced the amount of adware and malware they install.
Actually, AdBlock is making the new ad appear to those who have AdBlock installed -- I just saw my AdBlock icon light up and, when clicked, display this ad:
http://i.imgur.com/Kwi9qmD.png
I don't think we're in Kansas any more, Dorothy.
I saw the same thing, but that's not exactly the same thing as seeing ads, they're not (AFAIK) only showing AdBlock ads... they're informing you of something they are implementing in a hidden way.
If you really take offence to what they are doing then you (and not directed at you per se) - Uninstall AdBlock - View ads on websites, maybe click on them occasionally so click-through rates increase - Install Adblock Plus, because it's not the ad blocking that you are specifically against, just the fact they are advertising
The point is, you have options, and they are presenting options to potential users. This is how things work in a free-market economy. We're not living under a totally facist regime just yet...
I think it counts as an advertisement, and I'm not complaining, only observing. I just thought there was more than a touch of irony in AdBlock showing an ad within the AdBlock app.
> We're not living under a totally facist regime just yet...
Interesting comparison. A regime that forced us to watch ads could be described as Fascist, as could one that blocked all ads regardless of people's tastes. Anything that prevented free choice.
I couldn't agree more. I was posting on Usenet before there was a Web, so I've seen the entire sequence of events. Rather depressing overall. But it could be worse -- we could be hunted down and killed for expressing dissent, for protesting, for supporting unpopular causes. When I say this, I'm thinking of this man:
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/narendra-dabholkar-shot-d...
This man, this doctor, was an activist against unscientific quackery. He became too well-known and too effective, so his enemies hired a hit squad. And this was in India, a country and people that revere democracy and free speech.
For extra points, they should flaunt their privacy invading features, e.g. follow you around on all the sites you visit, cheerfully reminding you about the places you've been and how all the other advertisers are recording this too.
Is there any evidence of this happening?
But more seriously, I don't care about their bills. They're delivering HTML over an open network connection - what I do with that HTML is entirely up to me. If they don't like that there's nothing they can do about it.
> I don't care about their bills
[sarcasm] How farsighted. Oh how very farsighted. [sarcasm off]
So you really do not care about their service being shut down, because it could not pay for itself? I mean, people working there to produce content, hardware to run the service, bandwidth, and so on...
Apparently, many people are not comfortable with that kind of exchange. However, people being people, they still want to see the interesting stuff. So what do they do, they install this (free!) ad blocker that gets rid of all the things that are not immediately useful to them. Unethical? Possibly. But not illegal, and not even widely frowned upon.
So at this point, as a businessperson, I must ask myself whether my business model is still viable. If not, I must change it. That's what it means to be an entrepreneur: find ways to turn labour into money. Under Western democracies, I have that right, subject to laws and regulations. What I do not have is the right to having my particular business model be forever profitable.
This is a concept that the music, movie and game industries refused to wrap their head around. Their model was (and largely still is) "I give you these plastic things with bits on them and you give me money". This was acceptable to consumers as long as the plastic was required in order to be able to distribute bits. When this ceased to be the case, the business model started to fail. Rather than move to a different model (which, I realise, I make sound much easier than it is), they held onto the failing one, introducing complicated and fail-prone systems to prevent people from separating the bits from the plastic, in the process alienating their customers by making it harder and hard to actually use their products.
So, no, I don't feel bad when your business fails because of ad blocking. Being a selfish jerk, I'm upset you no longer send me interesting stuff. Being a compassionate human being, I'm sad a bunch of people lose their source of income. But this is the free market. If your business fails, you did something wrong. Someone else will come along and do it right.
It's like receiving free news every morning, but you have ordered a kid who delivers them to cut out ads.
Personally I use the free newspapers they unwarrantedly deliver to my house as a firestarter.
What's wrong with that? What laws is that breaking? I'm not even sure that's breaking any social contract.
As for your analogy...again, you're allowed to do that.
I don't really have a problem with ads on websites, experienced users can easily block them, but I see no problem with providing ads for a free service.
Many organizations only have three methods to generate revenue, either show advertisements, have paid memberships, or take donations. Google shows advertisements, Apple has paid memberships, Wikipedia and Apache Foundation take donations. All three are great companies, they just have different ways to generate revenue. Many websites have no choice but to move towards an advertisements method to remain operational,
Adblock is trying to destroy that method of revenue and the online advertising market, it could destroy many great websites and companies that currently make money from advertising. While I'm not a huge fan of ads, they do serve a purpose, and destroying a harmless market such as online advertising without replacing it or supplementing it somehow isn't good. Plus if Adblock is actually successful and the online advertising industry collapses, then they will be putting themselves out of business.
Even worse. Some of these companies (not adblock) are asking protection money from big advertisers to be whitelisted. Mafia style.
Can someone explain to me how that works?
Are you suggesting a free service can't make enough money to operate a business? Man, how am I getting away with not paying for that Wikipedia subscription.
Adblock operates on donations and if it were to eliminate advertising, its current product would become useless.
Because other people pay for you.
Maybe this is well-known, but my google-fu only turned up this news about Adblock Plus. Are you sure Adblock does it as well?
When I used adblock as the search criteria, I got a bunch of hits on it. But when I did adblock -plus, I got nothing primary that could pin this activity to AdBlock.
This is why native advertising is doing so well lately. Instead of having blockable ads surrounding your content, you subtly twist the content into being an ad of sorts. Ad blocking has helped fuel this and while it can be done well, it can also be done in a shady payola-esque way.. while being far harder to detect or block than regular ads.
Blocking ads is about as effective as banning abortions long-term. There's a non-shifting demand and it'll always find a way to express itself, whether in entirely legal ways or not.
Obfuscating would complicate things, but at least it'd be a workaround.
It's crazy that buySellAds hasn't taken advantage of this.
Good thing I have control of my software and can opt out.
I'm already assaulted at the senses all day long in different forms. The whole concept of advertising I find abhorrent. A service should only offer itself to me when I want it, otherwise they are just imposing themselves and I will dislike them for that.
Any way that I can opt-out of ads I will make use of.
Services that rely on just this business model should adapt or fail, simply. If the service is relevant it will come again from a different source with a more acceptable model.
They don't give a shit. To them the ads are just annoying and they're getting rid of them. They don't even read TOS agreements, let alone agree to some implicit contract where advertisements are required.
Also: nitpick. The people who created adblock aren't thieves in the same way the founders of the Pirate Bay aren't necessarily pirates. They themselves aren't stealing anything, just mass-producing a method whereby it's possible (in your opinion). I'm not trying to argue semantics, but if they were charged for something, it wouldn't be thievery.
Blocking ads has deprived nobody of their property unless you believe that a site is owed the revenue from ad impressions from its visitors (it's not). This is the same line of thinking of the MPAA with regard to how it approaches licensing.
Example: I only bother to block them on my main computer, but don't on my phone, desktop, etc. Your average Joe is unlikely to start doing so soon.
They have been and will continue to be the targets for malicious hackers who use them to serve malware to unsuspecting site visitors.
Until those ad networks are properly secured and monitored I will treat them as a security liability.
In many cases site admins go completely overboard with advertising creating a broken user experience. They choice you have then is to vote with your clicks and go elsewhere or attempt to use the site with an ad-blocker.
If any site admin wishes me to go elsewhere they can block users with ad blockers installed. If the site has value then they an ask POLITELY to whitelist their site; which for many sites I do add then to a site wide whitelist.
Assuming your site visitors of being thieves is not only stupid but illogical. If I walk past a billboard with my eyes close should I have them surgically removed because their are an adblocker? If I use a PVR to skip ads on TV am I stealing content? No; I am exercising a choice not to look at your pointless adverts.
The adverts add nothing to my experience of your site; I don't click on them so you won't be making any money from me for displaying them anyway.
Either find some other way to monetize your site (subs, sell merchandise, ask for donations etc) or find something else to do.
""" People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small.
They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it.
They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck That.
Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you.
They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
Banksy """
Source: http://www.elephantjournal.com/2013/01/banksy-manifesto/
Believe it or not, not everybody in the world gets to enjoy super fast internet connection speeds, cos they live in countries that are not so well developed or they are in very rural places. Why should they have to sit through waiting for irrelevant content to load? And the adverts are not relevant to them cos Google has no advertisers in their region? And they are on bandwidth capped plan so they are paying to see these adverts?
(The other front page article today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6274914)
Take away quotes -- "Seems to me like this is nothing more than a half-thought idea because they have nothing better to do and are jealous of AdBlock Plus taking bribes from ad companies to "white-list" them from being blocked."
"Want to have a real impact on advertising AdBlock? Do something that puts money in publisher bank accounts and gets advertisers results that's less obtrusive than the current state of affairs. Be creative.
An ad-free internet is a desert."
(full disclosure I work at buysellads)