>Going by your argument, a one-line black-on-beige text message saying "Sponsored by: $COMPANY_NAMES" is "crap".

Yes. At best it's tolerable crap.

>To me, saying who's paying for work is as much a matter of giving proper credit and fully disclosing where the money is coming from.

There's a difference between disclosure and advertisement. The latter has the notion that the information should literally be advertised, that is, thrust upon the viewer. I don't care that a paper cites collaborators or donors, I just don't want it to be done in such a way that pollutes my experience of the content. That's a crucial distinction.

>Personally, as an EasyList user, I'm a bit surprised that EasyList has a site-specific rule to block this particular "Sponsored by" message.

As an EasyList user, I'm considering making a donation precisely because they do this. Again: ad-blockers are about improving the signal-to-noise ratio on a site and preserving my attentional resources. Ad-blockers aren't about blocking ads, per se.

What, in your opinion, would be the effect on the signal-to-noise ratio if $blogger_x were to write a lengthy article tearing down the customer service of $company_y, but your ad blocker silently removed the banner at the top saying "this article was sponsored by $company_z"?

That would be problematic as there's an obvious value to labeling a piece of content as native advertising.

That's also not what's happening in the present case.

> That's also not what's happening in the present case.

Really? I'll grant you my hypothetical case is very rough-hewn, but let's refine it: - currently, troyhunt.com displays the message "Sponsored by: Sucuri: Incident Response, Monitoring, DDoS mitigation and WAF for websites" to me on all page views (albeit only if I disable uBlock, of course) - the article in question has nothing to do with Sucuri, except in their capacity as a sponsor of the content - what if it did? More precisely, if (and there might well be one; I've not checked) an article somewhere on troyhunt.com, without being directly written at Sucuri's behest, concerned itself with the downsides of Sucuri's main competitor (whoever that might be), would you still be able to say that your ad blocker improved the signal-to-noise ratio?

I understand: you don't see the ad as intrusive or unethical. I concede both points.

My argument is rather this: troyhunt.com is in the business of attracting users. These users do not wish to see the some content troyhunt.com has selected, so they've filtered it out by means of a third party. Now troyhunt.com (the business entity, not the individual, who I'm sure is a good person) is lashing out (albeit quite politely) against the means through which its clientele has expressed their expectations/desires. This is a case of shooting the messenger. It's bad business.

I don't think it's fair to say that the clientele of troyhunt.com have expressed anything - all we can say for sure is that some individual took it upon themselves to specifically categorise the sponsorship message as an advert in EasyList.

For what it's worth, I'm an occasional reader of the site, and until today I'd never seen the sponsorship message, or known that it existed, primarily because I have assumed good faith on the parts of the maintainers of EasyList - which assumption, it transpires, was a little misplaced. I think, underneath the understandable annoyance, this is the issue that Troy Hunt is getting at.

Okay, I think I understand: it's a question of disproportionate power. It takes a single (or few) users to flag something as an 'ad' on easylist.

I want to argue that this is nothing more than user-feedback. From that perspective, 'EasyList' becomes a destructive test: if my content can't pass EasyList standards, we have a catastrophic failure. This is a good thing, because we want to know which designs are incompatible with internet-business ('fail fast' as the kids say).

If you want to design the most resilient things, build them in the most dangerous environments. Your revenue stream should be very resilient. Lashing out against the environment strikes me as a poor strategic decision, especially when there's a simple way of making sponsorship more palatable for your users.

> But even scientific papers often have lines saying "Sponsored by NSF grant #1234."

Yeah, this brings a whole new slant onto the argument. It may be that there is some text attached to a document that must legally accompany that document. For instance, would it ever be alright for an ad-blocker to remove something like "Copyright 2018 ACME corporation"?

In what way is "This work was supported by a grant from ACME corporation" different?

The NSF grant funds public research done (in principle) for the common interest.

ACME's logo on public research has little or nothing to do with ACME's logo on a private, commercial website. In the former case, it's a certification and proof-of-work (on behalf of the NSF). In the latter case, it's literally commercial advertising. I think comparing advertising to public research is a big fat red herring.

Here troyhunt.com has a business problem: environmental forces make "simple" sponsorship an unreliable source of revenue. It takes few users to get the sponsorship link blacklisted on EasyList as intrusive (read: unpalatable) advertising. Clearly, you cannot make money doing things this way.

There are no easy solutions, but native advertising seems to work.