[Jason Dunn]

Originally Posted by pmgibson

See, I think we're starting to see attitudes that make my original comment about being "required" to view advertising whenever and wherever the advertiser chooses to display it.

The whole TV industry is eventually going to be turned on its head...and a lot of things are going to get broken along the way. Eventually the local cable companies are going to be nothing more than bit pipes - we'll get all our TV shows from the networks who are creating them. Things are going to change, no doubt about it...

[Jason Dunn]

Originally Posted by pmgibson

See, I think we're starting to see attitudes that make my original comment about being "required" to view advertising whenever and wherever the advertiser chooses to display it.

The whole TV industry is eventually going to be turned on its head...and a lot of things are going to get broken along the way. Eventually the local cable companies are going to be nothing more than bit pipes - we'll get all our TV shows from the networks who are creating them. Things are going to change, no doubt about it...

[Jason Dunn]

Originally Posted by pmgibson

My apologies for making you angry.

Angry? Nope, not at all. I apologize if you perceived my post that way - I certainly didn't intend to come across that way. I'm like the Hulk - when I'm angry, you know that I'm angry.

Originally Posted by pmgibson

But I'm not stealing from you because I choose not to look at the ads. Do you consider me to be stealing from you because I don't *click* on ads that I'm not interested in? If I come to your site and don't click on every ad on the page, then I have used the page without giving you benefit of all the revenue possible from the page. By the definitions used in this thread, that's stealing. But if anyone thinks that I'm going to click through all the ads on a page just to make sure the site owner gets his/her full share of revenue, they're crazy.

No, you misunderstand how that works - there are different types of ads, and most of them don't require clicking. The scenario we're talking about here, the scenario that Darius originally raised, is people who use ad blockers. Ad blockers that stop the ads from loading. No ads loading means no income for the site owner. There are two main type of ads:

CPM (Cost Per Mille): These are ads that earn the Web site owner income when they load. No clicking is needed (virtually every ad you see on all my sites). You don't need to look at them.

CPC (Cost Per Click): These are the ads where no income is earned for the site unless they are clicked on. This is like Google AdSense.

So basically, I'm not asking you or anyone else to look at the ads, click on them or anything else. Just let them load. Does it help me even more if you click on them? Sure, because it means the advertiser is more likely to renew their ad campaign again. But I'm not going to ask or expect people to do that.

People that use ad blockers stop the ads from loading - they're using our server resources, reading the content that we create, and stopping us from earning any income from it. To me, that's a form of theft. It's unethical.

Originally Posted by pmgibson

It all comes down to balance. If ads weren't annoying, popups for stuff I'll never buy, like online dating, or if they weren't right smack dab in the middle of text I'm interested in, I wouldn't want to block them.

This might surprise you, but I agree completely. I don't use ad blocking software, but because I use Firefox and IE7, I automatically block pop-up ads. Do I get irritated at ads that are in my face? Yeah, you bet. And I refuse all ads that I think cross the line and are irritating. I hope that people find the ads on my sites to be reasonable and non-irritating.

Originally Posted by pmgibson

Sorry if this comes accross as a little steamed, Jason, but the tone of your post left me somewhat irritated. I feel like I'm being taken to task for voicing an opinion that differs from yours.

That's funny, I didn't think you sounded "steamed" at all. But at the risk of offending you further, I don't think this is matter of "opinion". I'm paying for the server. This is what I do for a living. This is how I pay my bills and buy food. I don't particularly care if someone "thinks" that by blocking ads they're not hurting me - they are, and there's no arguing that. But that's not you, so we're not actually disagreeing about this.

Originally Posted by pmgibson

Let's all get rid of our ad blockers. And when you find a site that is just too annoyingly filled with ads, stop going to that site.

I think that's a fantastic idea, and it would be great if everyone did that. Myself, whenever I go to any site, I always click on an ad - I'll just do a quick scan of the page, click on something I find interesting, and check it out later. That's my way of giving back to the site that I found interesting enough to stop and read.

[bsoft]

Well, if you guys equate blocking ads with "stealing", then I'm not going to read your sites.

I don't block ads, and I even click on them - because I want to support sites that do work to bring me information.

But configuring my browser not to display certain content isn't "stealing". The whole notion is absurd. Am I "stealing" if I use a text-based browser that doesn't display ads? Or if I read an ad-free RSS fead rather than visiting the site?

There's been this wholesale abuse of the word "stealing". Downloading music illegally isn't "stealing", it's copyright infringement. Intellectual property is not the same as physical property. Copyright law does not give you "ownership" of content, merely a limited monopoly on its distribution.

So, I guess, that's where we are left. You have the right to believe whatever you want to believe. And I have the right not to visit your site.

[Darius Wey]

Originally Posted by pmgibson

But it's still insulting to be accused of it.

We've presented information on how the ad-supported model works and how ad blocking might be regarded as a form of theft. What you perceive as a result of processing that information is beyond our control; I apologize if you believe someone has made a direct accusation to you of being a thief, but no one in this thread has.

It seems that the discussion here has gone beyond the nature and ethics of ad blocking to the semantics of the words, "steal" or "theft", with an unnecessary fixation on their legal definitions and ramifications. At the end of the day, everyone thinks differently, and so there will always be a partition separating those who regard it as a form of theft, and those who don't. That is why this debate has ensued for years. But I believe that education goes a long way here. Even if someone disagrees with another's opinion on ad blocking, they have at least heard, and hopefully respected, what ad blocking means to them, and vice versa.

I've seen people completely alter their stance on ad blocking after dealing firsthand with the costs of running an ad-supported service. That's not to say that the publisher is always right. I do believe that they have a responsibility to ensure that the ads offered aren't overly intrusive and an irritation (for example, pop-ups), and I know Jason feels the same here, which is why the Thoughts Media sites feature ads that don't cloud the content that readers actually come here to read. It's all about trusting each other and working together to make the Web a great place to be in for both the consumer and the publisher.

[Sheena]

Well, count me among those that felt insulted by been considered a thief. Yes, I understand a site can use the revenue, but it also needs to be accessible & flexible enough to attract visitors. PPC Thoughts is one of my favorite places in the web & I visit it frequently, but there are hundreds of others where I go too. I pay dearly for broadband access & try to husband my resources to the max by using filters, blockers, RSS, newsletters, offline reading, etc. Above all, my time is the most precious resource & I won't waste it looking at things that at best I'm not interested in, & at worst are annoying; things that take double the time & space to load; things that cover 1/3 of my screen real estate.

Any site that cannot manage with a (big?) portion of its visitors enjoying their efforts for free should move to a paid-subscription-only format, although I dare say this perhaps wouldn't generate enough $ to offset the loss in popularity. As an alternative, a site can be set to not load properly when a filter is enabled. Take imdb for example. With ad filters on you can only see the text & links, not the images, & some secondary links do not load at all. I can disable the blockers when/if I need to go there. It's still free, but I have a choice, althought I don't visit as frequently as I would without that restriction.

I appreciate everyone's efforts to keep me informed, educated and/or entertained. I appreciate it's done for free in many sites like this. What I don't appreciate is the open concept that if I don't "give something in return" I'm stealing the bread right out of someone's mouth. When my finances allow, I join paid memberships & use site stores for purchases. Hell, I've been known to send voluntary contributions when things are going well. I think I deserve better than a guilt trip for not doing more to put $ in your pockets. Selfish of me to put my own interests first by some standards, but you're going to have to live with that.

Rosie

[Jason Dunn]

Originally Posted by bsoft

But configuring my browser not to display certain content isn't "stealing". The whole notion is absurd. Am I "stealing" if I use a text-based browser that doesn't display ads? Or if I read an ad-free RSS fead rather than visiting the site?

You're right, "stealing" isn't the perfect word. There's really no perfect word for what it is other than saying "I'm using your server resources, and reading your free content, but I'm also blocking your ads and denying you the ability to make a living". So I'm not sure what word would be. I can't think of a single thing that scenario is analogous to in the physical world - every comparison falls short. The only term I can come up with is "unethical".

I appreciate that you're not the ad-blocking type, even if you're not going to visit this site any longer. If everyone was like you (allowed regular banner ads to load), there's be a lot more publishers that could afford to run their Web sites full time, and a lot more great content out there.

[Jason Dunn]

Originally Posted by Sheena

Yes, I understand a site can use the revenue, but it also needs to be accessible & flexible enough to attract visitors. PPC Thoughts is one of my favorite places in the web & I visit it frequently, but there are hundreds of others where I go too.

It's a funny statement to say "a site can use the revenue". You make it sound like generating revenue is somehow just a "nice" thing to have - like it's optional. What do you do for a living? Is your paycheque optional? Try to put yourself in the shoes of the publisher and perhaps your opinion will change a little. I don't intent to sound snarky, but you seem to be dismissive of what I'm trying to do with these sites. Most of us small publishers try to eek out a full-time living doing this, and it's not easy, or stable.

Originally Posted by Sheena

I pay dearly for broadband access & try to husband my resources to the max by using filters, blockers, RSS, newsletters, offline reading, etc. Above all, my time is the most precious resource & I won't waste it looking at things that at best I'm not interested in, & at worst are annoying; things that take double the time & space to load; things that cover 1/3 of my screen real estate.

So you're saying that your broadband connection is somehow overwhelmed by the ads on Pocket PC Thoughts? I don't know what kind of broadband you have, so maybe that's the case, but for me the site loads in under 2 seconds - and the content displays in 1 second. If it ever takes longer than that, it's usually because our server is under a heavy load and blocking ads won't make that go any faster. Anyway, if that's too slow for you, then I don't really have a response for that.

But I will add that one of the reasons we provide full-content feeds is so that people can consume our content, largely ad-free (there are Feedburner ads at the bottom of some feed items) when they want to, and when they have the opportunity to, we hope they'll come to the site and let our banners loading pay for our continued existence.

Originally Posted by Sheena

Any site that cannot manage with a (big?) portion of its visitors enjoying their efforts for free should move to a paid-subscription-only format, although I dare say this perhaps wouldn't generate enough $ to offset the loss in popularity.

I sure wish that were true, but it's not - the only content people will pay for online is pornography. Reviews and news? Nope. That model simply doesn't work. The only way sites like ours continue to exist is that, thankfully, most people allow site ads to load (whether through a conscious decision, or through simply being ignorant of how to install an ad blocker).

Originally Posted by Sheena

As an alternative, a site can be set to not load properly when a filter is enabled.

Yes, that's an option, but not a very good one. I go out of my way to stop irritating and intrusive advertisements from appearing on my sites, to give people the best experience possible - and screwing up the site for them, even if they are blocking ads, is something I'd really prefer not to do. But maybe if more people start running ad-blockers, I might be forced to do that. I sure hope not.

Originally Posted by Sheena

What I don't appreciate is the open concept that if I don't "give something in return" I'm stealing the bread right out of someone's mouth.

I don't imagine anyone appreciates being told that, but it's the truth. Sometimes the truth is hard to accept if it means looking at your own actions and acknowledging that they're hurting others. I realize taking responsibility for ones actions is a very un-cool thing to do in the era in which we live...but if you block ads, you're hurting me. Period. Maybe not in a way that I can perceive, but if even 10,000 other people did what you're doing, I'd feel the hurt in a very significant way and probably have to shut down the sites. That's a fact.

What's kind of silly about all this is that you're only being asked to "give" bandwidth - to allow ads to load on a page. It's not like anyone is asking for your credit card number - and I suspect your bandwidth is free. So what's the cost to you - perhaps one second on a page load? If you totalled up all the time you saved blocking all ads, would you really have much of anything? I could understand if somehow that ads loaded first before the content, and you had to sit there staring at the ads loading before you could read the content...that would suck. But that's not the way we work here, or the way pretty much every site I can think of works. So your objections ring rather hollow.

Originally Posted by Sheena

When my finances allow, I join paid memberships & use site stores for purchases. Hell, I've been known to send voluntary contributions when things are going well. I think I deserve better than a guilt trip for not doing more to put $ in your pockets.

That's great to hear that you do that when you can - but it changes absolutely nothing about what you're doing by blocking ads. You can't do something to hurt a site owner then do something "nice" to offset that. If you were a subscriber here and you used our feature to turn off the ads, that's would be a very different thing.

And to think I said I wasn't going to comment much on this thread. I guess I should know better.

[Rob Alexander]

Some random comments on this thread...

1. Darius, you clearly have an excellent grasp of the English language so it's a bit disingenuous for you to complain that people are misconstruing your use of the word 'stealing'. You chose a negative, emotion-laden word knowing full well that it would cause offense. If you actually didn't know that, then you should have. Your use of the phrase 'analogous to' does nothing to mitigate the implied insult. If I were to say that believing we should not use ad-blocking software 'is analogous to being a low-life, sleazy, scumbag', you would hardly fail to take offense simply because of the word 'analogous'. Of course people feel insulted... you insulted them.

2. Darius, I'm not insulted by the stealing comment since I'm busy looking at the PPC Techs banner ad as I write this, but I am insulted by your assertion that, except for letting ads load, site users make no contribution to this site. (Post #13 "...they're enjoying the benefits of the service without offering anything in return.") Really? Let's take this thread for example and consider what we would have here without the contributions of your users. Post #1 - Darius says blocking banner ads is like stealing. Post #2 - Jason says, yeah, he agrees. There it is... that's the entire conversation unless your community contributes to the thread. How many people would come read that exciting thread? Not many, I imagine, and then where would your ad revenue be? You are looking at this as a one-way medium, but it's not. The contributions of your community are a major part of the content of this site. I've spent more time in this one thread (refreshing the banner ads as I move back and forth around the pages) than I have on the entire site in the past two weeks. It's not an interesting thread solely because of your original post; it's an interesting thread because of the contributions of your community.

3. Jason, you set the terms for the site so don't complain if people take you up on what you offer. As others have pointed out, you have the option of a subscription service, a service that denies information to those who block ads, a service with crazy, horrible pop-up ads, a service with discrete ads or even, as you first started out, a free service with no ads at all. No one is taking the food out of your mouth or denying you a living. (If this doesn't work, you can always start a different business or get a regular job.) People are responding, as individuals, to their own valuation of what you provide and the terms under which you provide it. You've explained why you believe this is the only balance of service/ads that will work for your site (and you're probably complete right about that), but then you just have to accept that some blocked ads are a cost of doing business. If you were a grocer, you'd have some fruit spoil without being bought. That's not your customers' fault for not buying enough fruit, it's just a cost of doing business. The grocer needs to find a balance between ordering too much or too little fruit and you need to find a balance between enough ads to make a living without making them so intrusive that you drive people to use ad-blockers. (I think you do a nice job with that balance, btw.)

4. It bugs me that the thread actually has taken on an adversarial tone. Jason, remember when you first started putting up ads? You told the community that you really had to do it to keep the site running and the vast majority of people said that, if that's what you need to do, you should do it. That's because we all want you to be successful and to be able to make a living out of this. May I respectfully suggest that you would receive a better response from your current community if you posted a thread asking people not to block ads on this site as a way to support what you do here, than if you call them thieves or tell them they are unethical. Most people will go out of their way to support a friend, but few people will be shamed or insulted into offering support.

5. On the original topic, my 22" wide screen desktop is an entirely different animal than my 2.8" HTC Touch. I'm content to have ads here of the type that Jason does, but I have little room for content on my Touch, much less room for ads. I wasn't planning to use MS Live anyway, but this would be a deal breaker for me. I'll pay for services if I need to but I won't shuffle through piles of ads looking for snippets of content on my phone.

[Darius Wey]

Originally Posted by Rob Alexander

1. Darius, you clearly have an excellent grasp of the English language so it's a bit disingenuous for you to complain that people are misconstruing your use of the word 'stealing'. You chose a negative, emotion-laden word knowing full well that it would cause offense. If you actually didn't know that, then you should have.

Considering that the word is hardly an expletive, I believe that it's as negative and emotion-laden as you want it to be. When focusing on a highly debatable topic such as ad blocking, if you can evaluate reasoning presented to you and accept the effects your actions has on others, I suspect that the word would hardly cause offense.

I know people who download and distribute music and warez via P2P like there's no tomorrow. Call it what you want - theft, copyright infringement, an unethical practice - they know and accept what they're doing, and acknowledge the ill-effects their actions have on the people who worked hard to deliver the original content. I've seen others tell them that they're "stealing", yet they don't even bat an eyelid.

If you cannot accept - and yes, this can be hard sometimes - you will take offense when people call you out for it.

Originally Posted by Rob Alexander

Your use of the phrase 'analogous to' does nothing to mitigate the implied insult.

I used that phrase because I accepted that ad blocking was not a 1:1 match to stealing in the physical world. Some of the underlying principles still remain intact, but you're not going to suffer the legal repercussions as a result of your actions.

Now, perhaps I made the mistake of assuming that, regardless of one's actions, there would still be widespread acceptance and understanding of the effects ad blocking has on others. My use of the word, "stealing", was never meant as a direct or implied insult, so I apologize if it's had quite the opposite effect. And its juxtaposition with "analogous to" was certainly not done with the intention of mitigation.

Originally Posted by Rob Alexander

2. Darius, I'm not insulted by the stealing comment since I'm busy looking at the PPC Techs banner ad as I write this, but I am insulted by your assertion that, except for letting ads load, site users make no contribution to this site. (Post #13 "...they're enjoying the benefits of the service without offering anything in return.") Really? Let's take this thread for example and consider what we would have here without the contributions of your users.

No, you've taken that statement out of context. I was focusing chiefly within the realm of ads and the returns offered by ads, and not specifically on Thoughts Media, but rather, a broader level.

Please do not think that I or Jason or anyone else on the Thoughts Media team does not value the contributions you and every other reader make toward promoting community discussion. Over the years, I have stressed countless times the importance of the community. My stance on that has not changed and it never will change.