You should just stop visiting the site instead. Your still taking their content, but it sounds like what's really not of any concern to you, is their monetization strategy.
If they want to charge me something, that's OK. If they want to have reasonable, unobtrusive, ads without tracking, that's OK, too. But, what many sites currently do is not OK. So, fuck'em.
What is "not OK"? These are subjective concerns. If you're going to the site you're still showing you find the content to be of value, so why do you feel its ok for the site to not make any revenue?
You're conflating the ability to do something with whether it's morally right or not. Ad blocking will only hurt the long-tail and freedom of the internet that everyone currently enjoys.
Btw, payments arent exactly some kind of perfect answer. It will always cost more than ads and is no less private, in fact you end up giving up even more of your details.
I view it as a negotiation, and this is me blowing out their proposed deal. Imagine you're sitting at the bargaining table and the first offer the person on the other side gives you is an order of magnitude more than you're willing to pay. Say, they want you to pay $50,000 for a car that you know is only worth $5,000.
This is the point at which you "blow out" their offer. You could say something like, "I don't think we're on the same page at all about the value of this good. I have to walk away if you consider that a reasonable offer."
The other party can counter with, "OK, what are you comfortable with?"
So, right now, in the ads vs. privacy negotiation I've said, "No. You're not even on the right page. You are asking an order of magnitude more than I'm willing to give you for this product."
They, of course, have the right to let me walk away. They can block me, if they'd like, and put such things in their terms of service. But, the fact is, they engaged in this first. The advertisers created this arms race, a race for the most tasteless, obnoxious, privacy-invading, and intrusive ads they could design. I am merely implementing my own disarmament plan and imposing it on them, whether they like it or not (they don't, obviously...but, again, I don't care; advertisers have destroyed any sympathy I may have had for them).
As I mentioned, I took years to install an ad blocker. I am willing to negotiate, but I gave them an inch and they took a mile. They didn't respect "do not track", they took steps to insure that I would be interrupted, even if I wasn't even looking at the tab where they're spewing their garbage with auto-starting audio ads (this was my personal tipping point, I had four or five of them happen in one day of browsing and decided "Never again.").
Advertisers did this to themselves. They have no one to blame but themselves. I don't know what comes next, but I've opted out of their system, and I'll continue to do so as long as the technology is used in the most nefarious ways possible.
This is the same argument from many people who pirate content, but here's the thing: Consuming the content if you find the negotiation unacceptable is not "walking away" from the deal. It's like they ask for 50000 for a car that's worth 5000, so you just take the car regardless. Neither side is right, but I would say taking something you find value in without the requested payment is more wrong.
The better way of walking away is to just not consume the content. That way the other side realizes their position is unacceptable without feeling ripped off.
"This is the same argument from many people who pirate content"
I disagree with this (utterly and without room for discussion), and the courts disagree with this as well.
The content in question has been made available publicly on the open web. It is up to me and my browser to decide which parts of the content I download and look at. Further, I'm unaware of any site which includes in their terms of service that they require visitors to view ads in order to see the content (even without bringing up the technical methods of enforcing such a rule).
I strongly suspect that most sites with ads would rather people visit than not, even if they don't see the ads. I certainly feel that way about all of my websites (though admittedly very few of my websites rely on ads for their value).
"The better way of walking away is to just not consume the content."
Which I also do. But, when it comes to browsing HN and reddit and clicking links off to sites I don't know, I have every right to proactively protect my privacy and peaceful browsing free of intrusive/noisy ads.
> so why do you feel its ok for the site to not make any revenue?
There are many, many ways to monetize. Ad blocking doesn't stop them from making any revenue for their content. If the company in question still didn't realize that people don't like ads and any decently informed person uses an ad blocker then they are probably behind the times. Why would they rely on ads exclusively to monetize their content?
Relying on ads to monetize might have worked in the past. Adopt new ways to make money, the trend nowadays is to sell software and content as a service. That is much better than forcing me to view some gifs / videos / annoying ads or even text ads that waste precious space on the website.
Or, you know, keep visiting the site until they switch to making money in a way that is not annoying. And it's not just the sounds and the graphics and the non-obvious placement and framing. It's the bloody tracking as well. If they want to play dirty to make money off my ass, I can play dirty, too.
"Monetization strategy" makes it sound good. It's not. If it's so bloody disgusting, it's a ripoff, not a business done in good faith. It deserves about as much respect as a scam.
The only possible choices are ads that flash, pop up, and play music, or a paywall? That is a false dichotomy.
It is possible to serve tasteful, malware free, silent ads. Most sites choose not to. I, and an increasing number of people are choosing not to view the invasive ads.
No paywall, no annoying ads, and I still pay my share if I want to keep away from the ads.
What about ads like Facebook's sponsored content? Non-flashy, clearly marked as advertising, in the upper-right portion of the screen or something, so that I can read the text without getting flashbanged.
I agree with all that. That's in fact all my company does. However blocking ads is a brute force approach that's causing more harm then good right now.
Guilt in this case is nonsensical. If the site wanted to detect, and then not serve, the users who block their ads, that's actually very easy to implement, technologically. But very few sites do this. Most site owners are, then, making a conscious choice to continue to serve these people who aren't making them money. If they want to give you something for nothing, let them! And if they want to not give you something for free, that's their choice to make!
Yeah, it's theoretically impossible to stop a determined extension-writer from perfectly blocking ads in a way that leaks no information. But current implementations are sloppy and leak all sorts of information. Usually you can just run some (inline!) Javascript to inspect the DOM and then do something.
Or, if the client won't run Javascript at all (and you might consider making your site require Javascript to render anything, just to stymie these users, if you're on this path already), you can still set a background-image property as a "default" for a banner div, in a way that it will never get requested if the ad does get rendered, but will get requested if it doesn't. (OKCupid uses this approach, if I recall.) You can then use that information just for analytics, or you can go further and change what the server serves that client from then on (i.e. make all further pages for that session return an error.)
The usual way sites do it is have a script that checks for any loaded ads and displays that message. This script itself can easily be blocked if sites decide to do more with it, and it has because the list is maintained by groups that decide what goes on it. They're willing to let simple messages slide but blocking the content has already proven to not work.
