Blocking online ads – is it ethical?
Short answer is “yes” perfectly ethical.
Longer answer – I block advertising on television as well. I do this by time-shifting and skipping the ads. My remote fast forward manages to exactly bypass the ad break, so my viewing is not interrupted by inane sales pitches. If the vendors of entertainment cannot raise revenue in any other way, then I am not obliged to be subjected to advertising. The only time I am interested is when I specifically have a purchase in mind – then I will buy a publication with adverts in it so that I can peruse the market. But unsolicited advertising? Nope. Not interested. And in turning my back, I am not being remotely unethical and I am not – as one advertiser tried to claim – stealing content.
The advertisers are getting hot under the collar because Adblock will allow them through their filter if they meet certain criteria – for a fee. You have to admire the chutzpah. However, even if Adblock whitelists them, I’ll promptly blacklist them again when they creep through the net.
I don’t buy anything as a consequence of someone sticking an advert in my face. Indeed, the precise opposite will happen. So best not to do it. Because they won’t, I’ll continue to use Adblock and I do so with a clear conscience. They are free to put adverts on their sites, and I am free not to look at them.
I find that I’m blind to adverts anyway. It goes back to the first time I started using the internet and realising that one had to scroll down to find the rest of the page or the ‘next’ button.
I do find though that adverts are a pain when using a tablet as there is precious little ‘unlinked’ screen area that can be used for scroll control.
The really annoying adverts are the ones that come with a soundtrack.
We do exactly the same here, We virtually never watch a TV prog in real time and I adblock everything I can on the net. Generally I refuse to patronise any company that tries to force me to watch their ads.
Is it ethical? What bollocks!
Even before time shifting tellys, people used to get up in the ad break and make a brew. That is no different and making a cuppa instead of watching the adverts is no less ethical. Even if you’re not drinking fairtrade tea.
It is surely a question of choice not ethics.
However it is true that without advertising in the media the things from which we benefit free at point of delivery, we would have to buy or not be available.
Taken to its logical conclusion, is it unethical to look the other way when passing a bill hoarding in the street, or go to make the tea during a commercial break on the TV?
The notion that you do not buy things because of advertisements is naïve and I am struggling with ‘unsolicited’ advertising… it is unsolicited by its nature, otherwise it would be called product information sent on request.
Because you do not consciously notice advertising or connect it with a decision to buy, does not mean it has never influenced you… and advertising comes in many forms.
In my former life I commissioned market research in which one of the questions asked how much advertising contributed to purchase decision. About 90% said not at all.
Further well down in the survey in answer to a question about what things influence purchasing decisions, ‘advertising’ scored in the top three.
There’s nothing naive about it. I am well aware of marketing ploys and am perfectly able to avoid their influence. Although, yeah, to be fair they can influence me. If they annoy me enough they absolutely guarantee that I won’t buy the product and will seek out their competitors if I want that type of item.
Any advert that interrupts my viewing – Internet site or television is unsolicited. However, when I wanted a camera, I bought camera magazines in part to use the adverts to get a feel for the market. Such adverts, precisely aimed at a specific market were not unsolicited.
Had I been completing your survey (unlikely as I never complete surveys, but, hey, I’ll run with it) my answers would have been somewhat different. I almost never buy a product or service as a consequence of advertising. I say this, even though I realise that a degree of it is necessary to get a product or service to the market – but refer back to my point about targeting the market accurately. Trade magazines for example, not random websites where the target is identified as a result of intrusive monitoring of web habits and is highly likely to be inaccurate or television where a programme is interrupted to deliver a sales pitch right at the moment when people are not looking to buy.
For the providers of websites, there is a problem if they need to generate revenue. It just means they will have to think laterally. They are not losing revenue if we block the ads, though. An example is the Times. Before it went behind a paywall, I would peruse it from time to time while blocking the ads. Once it went behind the paywall, I had a choice – pay up or not read it. This was not a difficult decision. As I was never going to pay for the content, the content provider has lost nothing by me blocking the adverts – I was never going to be a customer in the first place and am perfectly happy with not reading their articles.