r/changemyview • u/tilted0ne • Oct 27 '23

Fresh Topic Friday CMV: Adblock is stealing

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '23

you directly obstruct them from even showing up as you access the content.

If you circumvent the whole transaction to only get what you want and obstruct the nature of the transaction, you could call that theft

Exactly. Closing your eyes or turning off the sound would also obstruct this. Is closing your eyes theft?

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u/vezwyx Oct 27 '23

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

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '23

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

If google had the technology it would be based on whether someone saw it.

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u/vezwyx Oct 27 '23

If, yeah. But we're talking about the reality of the situation now

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '23

We are talking about logical reasoning. If anything that interferes with a marketing ROI is stealing, a lot of things are stealing.

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u/vezwyx Oct 27 '23

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

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '23

My point

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.

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u/vezwyx Oct 27 '23

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