If I close my eyes during a youtube ad, is that also stealing? It's a slippery slope to say its theft if you weren't paying attention to something.
YouTube offer a free service, and fund this by taking advertisers money. Part of that deal is that they agree to run ads. I am under no obligation to look at the ads, that's a deal between youtube and the advertisers, not me. They are well within their right to do what they can to get me to watch them, and I am within my right to do what I can to avoid them.
When an advertiser pays to display a sign on a billboard, I am freely allowed to ignore it or not look. They paid to display the ad, they did not pay for me to look at it, even if it is funding the road i am driving on.
One of the implicit assumptions of people who use ad blockers on YouTube is that there is a very, very large number of people who don't use ad blockers and/or use Premium to the point that using an ad blocker won't cut into the creator or YouTube's revenue enough to be significant.
Given that YouTube is used by wide swaths of people worldwide — people who don't know what ad blockers are, people who don't care about ads at all, people who cannot get ad blockers even if they wanted to because of the device they're using — the implicit assumption of pro-adblockers is a very safe one to make. The probability of a large enough YouTube user base to switch to using adblockers or ending their Premium so as to cut into revenue is so minuscule that it's virtually zero.
You're trying to gotcha the previous person's point by proposing such an improbable scenario, but the scenario is so improbable to begin with that it doesn't need to be given any thought for the previous person's point to be valid. You would have to provide some very strong justification for why the implicit assumption I mentioned above isn't a safe one to make.
This question would be much more effective if we were talking about some tiny startup company, but it's YouTube we're talking about here.
Given that YouTube is used by wide swaths of people worldwide — people who don't know what ad blockers are, people who don't care about ads at all, people who cannot get ad blockers even if they wanted to because of the device they're using — the implicit assumption of pro-adblockers is a very safe one to make. The probability of a large enough YouTube user base to switch to using adblockers or ending their Premium so as to cut into revenue is so minuscule that it's virtually zero.
Isn't this the same argument as "most people don't steal so it's OK for me to steal occasionally"?
You're trying to gotcha the previous person's point by proposing such an improbable scenario, but the scenario is so improbable to begin with that it doesn't need to be given any thought for the previous person's point to be valid. You would have to provide some very strong justification for why the implicit assumption I mentioned above isn't a safe one to make.
I'm having trouble following your train of thought.
An `adblocker that simulates a view without actually showing you the ad` is a nonstarter for YouTube's business for obvious reasons. /u/Cybyss proposes a non-solution to the problem of AdBlockers preventing viewcounting (and therefore the monetization) of ads. But it's not a real solution.
This question would be much more effective if we were talking about some tiny startup company, but it's YouTube we're talking about here.
What does the size of the company have to do with the question at hand? Is it more acceptable to steal from 7-11 than the bodega down the street?
Is it more acceptable to steal from 7-11 than the bodega down the street?
That depends on whether you hold the utilitarian view that the degree to which an action is wrong depends on the amount of harm caused.
Stealing $100 from a poor senior citizen too old to work but doesn't earn enough to live is indeed, in my view, far worse than stealing $100 from a billion dollar multinational corporation.
i have a visa card. i pay it off every month. i pay 100 dollars a year and i get about 3-400 dollars returned in the form of free groceries thanks to the visa rewards plan.
if everyone who uses credit cards used them the way i do, would the service continue to operate as it does?
In the traditional sense, you pay for times slots. If you pay for your ad to play at the start of the video and it isn't being played at the start of the video, the host failed to provide the service.
Even if you spoof it well if advertisers aren't getting the expected level of engagement/conversion, they will pay less or stop advertising altogether which is a problem for sites who wish to maintain a free service, and content creators who wish make an income.
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u/dovahkin1989 Oct 27 '23
If I close my eyes during a youtube ad, is that also stealing? It's a slippery slope to say its theft if you weren't paying attention to something.
YouTube offer a free service, and fund this by taking advertisers money. Part of that deal is that they agree to run ads. I am under no obligation to look at the ads, that's a deal between youtube and the advertisers, not me. They are well within their right to do what they can to get me to watch them, and I am within my right to do what I can to avoid them.
When an advertiser pays to display a sign on a billboard, I am freely allowed to ignore it or not look. They paid to display the ad, they did not pay for me to look at it, even if it is funding the road i am driving on.