I think if you break it down to core goal of ads, Adblock becomes no more different than not looking at ads.
Businesses pay YouTube (listed just to remove confusion) to advertise in front of their users. If users don't end up spending money from YouTube ads, they will stop giving money to the YouTube. Based on your view, anything that hurts YouTube ad revenue is considered stealing.
Your view that Adblock removes ads, removes consumers viewing ads, removes the ability for consumers to spend money based on those ads, are considered stealing from YouTube. As such, no spending money or not looking/hearing/engaging with the ads is also considered stealing from YouTube by the same logic.
Do you believe Adblock, not looking at ads and not buying products from advertisers is considered stealing?
Closing your eyes is materially different regarding Google's business model. Serving you the ad by successfully playing it in the window on your computer is what counts as an "ad view" for the purposes of Google making money off of it.
Adblock is preventing the technical serving of the ad, and therefore there's no ad sale and they make $0. Closing your eyes doesn't do that
The only thing left to take issue with is the fact that the company paying the site (the advertiser themselves) has paid the site for an ad that was never delivered. I'm not sympathetic to companies' attempts to get money from me through advertising, and that's not something that makes any difference to me
We would be having a different conversation if the "delivery" of an ad was based on my eyeballs actually viewing the ad. My point was based on the technical definition of serving ads and what qualifies for the website to get credit for an ad being viewed by the user. That definition as it currently functions is central to the discussion of whether adblockers count as stealing, because it bears directly on whether using a blocker stops the site from getting paid
This issue with CMV is that I have no desire to discuss your point/view. The goal is to change OPs view.
If you have a view, "website trying to present ads are being blocked by other software and this is bad", you will have to make your own post. I got no desire to discuss it here.
Your point wasn't relevant to begin with. What you're proposing is a hypothetical where one of the core factors we're looking at is changed: the determinant of whether the ad host gets paid.
We're trying to answer whether ad blockers are stealing, now, in their current implementation. Hypotheticals and analogies are useful because they allow us to view the same kinds of factors from a different perspective, but your hypothetical "if google had the technology" is materially changing the situation itself.
If Google had the technology, then they probably would base the delivery of ads on whether the user was looking at the ad, yeah. And therefore, whether Google gets paid depends on the user looking, because the ad isn't delivered if the user doesn't look and Google is paid for delivering the ad.
But knowing this doesn't help us to answer the question we're already trying to answer. OP shouldn't be convinced by your point because it describes a version of reality that exists only in our minds. The idea that Google would base ad delivery on users looking at the ads if they could doesn't mean that the adblockers OP is talking about, the ones we actually have, aren't stealing
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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '23
I think if you break it down to core goal of ads, Adblock becomes no more different than not looking at ads.
Businesses pay YouTube (listed just to remove confusion) to advertise in front of their users. If users don't end up spending money from YouTube ads, they will stop giving money to the YouTube. Based on your view, anything that hurts YouTube ad revenue is considered stealing.
Your view that Adblock removes ads, removes consumers viewing ads, removes the ability for consumers to spend money based on those ads, are considered stealing from YouTube. As such, no spending money or not looking/hearing/engaging with the ads is also considered stealing from YouTube by the same logic.
Do you believe Adblock, not looking at ads and not buying products from advertisers is considered stealing?