this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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Wow, there are a lot of comments describing how neccessary it must be to use adblock. I don't think I can actually change anyone's mind here, but I'm going to share my perspective anyway:
While I don't agree with the statement quoted in the original post, I do think that ads are neccessary for most websites I visit to function. Not because of the content creators, but because of the companies running the platforms.
I know, ads can be problematic. But to outright block all ads is no solution. Privacy and data protection are very important to me, so I'm against every form of targeted ads. But just generic or maybe contextual ads? I don't see any harm in that. Malware is mentioned often in other comments. I disable JavaScript whenever I can. That's absolutely enough for blocking all ads to not make any real difference in terms of security. Although I have to admit that blocking scripts also blocks some ads.
But still, I see all ads on YouTube and search engines for example. And I'm happy to see them. It's incredible that such platforms, providing so many people with access to so much content from so many other people can actually exist. There are a lot of resources needed for this.
And if I still don't want to see ads simply because I don't want to? Then I don't have to, even without any adblockers. If I don't think a website is worth the ads it thinks it needs to show me, then I don't have to use it. I can just leave. If it is easy to provide the same service without ads then there must be countless alternatives already.
Yes this works for websites with a large user base, me and my friends made a better wiki than existing one for an old game we all play, we tried using ads but we barely made pennies, we switched to using a "support us" tab in menu and we earned about $3 a month, more than unregulated ads that had a lot of sexual content.
We didn't hope to profit, heck one of us was actually running it on their own server, but the money was enough to pay for domain name and anything else was given to main programmer.
Have you ever heard of a website that went down because they didn't get enough ad revenue? I do get your point, but I also feel like a huge majority of websites (and all that I use) do just fine even If I use Adblock. I just personally feel like using Adblock is doing very little harm but has so many benefits.
No, I don't have heard of such a website. (Although the comment made by Shady_Shiroe comes funnily close to it.) But that is probably because all ad supported sites I visit have more than enough users without adblock to support themselves.
From a pure, real and practical standpoint you are right. For you and me and most users here it won't do any harm to use adblock. But that only works because there are so many people who don't. If everyone were to use adblock now, then the websites would start to either find ways to circumvent the adblock or they would not be available anymore, either because they went down or got paywalled. I'm fine with paying for some websites. But there are too many things I think are useful on the internet to be able to pay for each and every thing I see individually or via subscription.
What I want to say is that I don't think it would be good if a big portion of users would start to use adblock so I don't think it could be right for any individual person to do so, even if you can't tell how many more adblock users it would take to make a negative impact.