Jesper points to “Why FireFox[sic] is Blocked”. Let me take these five seconds to have a good laugh.
…thank you. And I don’t even use Firefox (much).
I believe I have nothing to add to Jesper’s commentary.
Oh, except for one thing. His final sentence reads:
Instead of telling people to go fuck themselves and accusing them of crimes they didn’t commit for not liking your site, why not improve your site?
This highlights two false mentalities: one, that there is entitlement (if not legal obligation) for consumers to watch/click/follow/show interest in advertisements, and two, that, as people’s interest in your website appears to wane, you should encourage/coerce/force people to look at them.
The bit I have to add is that, sadly, both of these absurdities are prevalent not just in advertisement-supported websites, but also in other media, such as TV. This goes so far that many people indeed think that blocking advertisements (such as by, say, cutting them out of your PVR recording) is somehow morally wrong. It’s not! It never has been. If you want to show your token of appreciation for content, go buy a product of theirs with an actual price tag, or donate to the producers. For any company or organization to rely primarily, or even exclusively, on advertisements for their profits is their choice to make, and their problem to deal with.
Oh, and by the by, reddit had a related piece a few weeks ago. Yup, there it is.
Others' Thoughts
Comment on August 18th, 2007 at 5:11 am
Well, if you want to talk about rights, it is the right of the content provider to determine to whom they are willing to provide content. If they only want to provide content to people who will see the ads they have, then that is their choice. There is nothing absurd in that at all.
Similar case to be made for television (broadcast, at least): a TV broadcast is a free service; you stick an antenna into your television and away you go. The ads are how the station makes the money to provide that nominally free service…you implicity agree to view the ads in exchange for utilizing the service provided to you. If it could be shown that too few people were watching the ads (and thus the advertising companies would stop paying/pay less to the broadcaster), then it would either have to shut down the free service or swap to a subscriber method. Frankly, it is easier to measure viewers and determine a compensation ratre for the broadcaster from the advertiser than it is for thousands and thousands of viewers independently to go and donate to/compensate the broadcaster (which wouldn’t happen anyway without sufficient goading; please see the weeks of time that PBS stations utilize for their phone-pledging campaigns). Arguably, with cable stations, you could say that you want no ads, but then be prepared to deal with much higher subscription rates. The money is going to be made somewhere to compensate content providers, and all the people crying for the freedoms and rights of the consumer apparently fail, in general, to comprehend that.
Comment on August 18th, 2007 at 10:11 am
It is the right of the content provider to refuse to provide said content to people who don’t watch ads. Sure. Or, to complain that too few people watch ads. Or, to shut down or move to a different commercial model as a result.
But likewise, it is the right of consumers to watch content without watching ads. There is an implicit agreement, but nothing legally binding. And the difficulty for a content provider to be profitable is not the consumer’s problem.
Comment on August 19th, 2007 at 2:38 am
Well, yes, I suppose it isn’t the issue of the consumer to care about the profitability of the content provider unless, say, the consumer were interested in seeing more/new content and not seeing the provider shut down…
Comment on August 19th, 2007 at 10:28 am
There’s a difference between saying, matter-of-factly and honestly, that “because some people are not clicking ads, we are losing ad revenue, and since we’re not willing to change our revenue source we’ll be forced to cut down on our reporting” and between saying, as they did, that “around 15% of the web users are using a browser that has one particular publicly available addon that allows people to block ads, therefore we’re going to be gigantic asses and not only block them in return for exercising their right to change what our pages look like once they’ve been transfered to their hard drives but accuse them and the company that makes the browser of theft”.
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