My issue with this view is that the viewer makes himself seem like this victim. Let's put ourselves in this scenario again. You, the viewer, are on my website. You're using my server bandwidth while using my website functions, which probably had a lot of investment go into them whether they were services or content. Multiply you by a 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 and now we have a problem.
This you take for granted. This you don't pay for.
It's my website. I choose how to monetize it. If you like that, great; otherwise, stop using my website. Until we generate some automatic way of blocking you from ever using my website while you're on AdBlock, then what you're doing is stealing. No one forces you to use my website.
A lot of examples in the real world apply here. There are adverts on highways, buses, buildings. Removing that clutter-creating huge banner ad from the middle of the mall; how's that different from removing a leader-board from a blog?
How can removing ads completely and automatically - from websites that earn their entire existence from adverts - while still accessing the website's content and using their server bandwidth anything less than a cowardly immoral act of theft? And to hide behind that as some sort of hero for having the mental capability of installing AdBlock is just downright delusional.
Blocking advertisements from people that live off of them while still using their resources is theft. Plain and simple.
If you leave 50,000 hot dogs on your porch every day, marked "Free hotdogs! Come early, come often, and tell your friends!" and each has some nasty sauce on it I dislike, I'm going to take a hotdog and make an effort to remove the sauce. If I carry a sauce-removal machine, so much the better for me.
You're claiming a right to follow me down the block screaming "STOP THIEF! I ONLY GET PAID IF YOU EAT THE SAUCE!"
See the problem? If I'm not a party to any of the agreements under which you get paid, you don't get to bitch to me if my behavior fails to generate cash for you.
Especially since you're pretty much spot-on correct. Maybe that's why the downvotes? People don't like to have their world view challenged.
I will continue to use AdBlock, and I will continue to entrepreneur.
Piracy is zero-cost (other than the "lost customer" argument) to the record label. Bandwidth is something SOMEONE pays for. If you're stealing my bandwidth, either by deep-linking a photo to put into a news article or by reading my site while blocking the monetization I've put on it, that's real money you're costing me, not some theoretical "you would have bought it if you didn't pirate it" argument of loss.
And there's no micropayment system that would allow a small blog to charge you the 1/100 of a cent that an ad might earn, so really there's no alternative unless you're a big enough company with a compelling enough product that you can charge a non-trivial subscription fee.
Advertising is what allows us to have great, free content on the Internet. Saying all sites should ask the customer to pay kills most startups and popular sites dead.
Either admit that you don't care if you're helping them succeed, or don't run adblock.
Actually, the one killer feature I could see adblock implementing is automatically adding sites to your whitelist if you clicked a link in a given domain. The articles I read on Hacker News are interesting and I'd like to support them. Therefore, automatically whitelist any domain I visit from hn. Seems like it would be both simple and solve the "I only want to support good content" issue.
Did I stop using those tools? Not a chance. Advertising is for suckers. If your site or service uses it then I wish you success, but I will not feel one iota of remorse for taking every opportunity to reduce the clutter and distraction of advertising from my life. If you want my money have the balls to ask me for it rather than trying to sell me as your secondary product.