Guy thinks adblock is piracy

[Izzy]

Several of you practically bragged that you block ads, and we shocked that I said that doing so was piracy. Don't pirate content. don't use adblockers, if you enjoy content don't steal it.

This has got to be the worst opinion I've heard all year. He makes some incredibly illogical analogies and honestly expects people to agree with him.

[Xx{Midnight}xX]

Re: Guy thinks adblock is piracy

The thing is in a sense the man is right (I didn't watch his video as chances are his reasoning is garbage) because Adblockers stop the websites from gaining money off material you'd normally see and by using adblock you're in a sense viewing content for free.

I don't agree or think adblock is wrong, but I'm just saying that logically he's correct in a roundabout sense.

Especially when you think of the people who do it for live streams. They make money off airing adds between games ect. Simply using adblock subtracts from their expected income for the content you're viewing. Hopefully those of us who watch these don't take money from these people all the time. Because let's face it, the amount of ads to fund a show or stream even is ****ing absurd.

Just my like 37 cents.

[Izzy]

Re: Guy thinks adblock is piracy

Ad revenue is a poor business model when the end user has a right / capability to display or not display what they want on their own screen. Yes it subtracts from the amount that they earn, but that doesn't make it wrong or make it piracy.

Like one of the comments said on the video. You can flip the channel on your tv during commercials so does that make it piracy?

[SKG_Scintill]

Re: Guy thinks adblock is piracy

Can't they make adblock so that the website thinks the ad was seen, but doesn't show the ad to you?

[Cavernio]

Re: Guy thinks adblock is piracy

I don't expect to agree with most anti-piracy advocates including him.
I see his point though. Isn't ad revenue, like, the ONLY business model for the majority of websites?
If we start making comparisons of what is piracy and what isn't, most anti-piracy laws start to fail to make sense.

[Reincarnate]

Re: Guy thinks adblock is piracy

The whole point of advertising is to make money off expected exposure -- and hopefully enough to cover the price of the advertising opportunity/space. Blocking ads kills the purpose of this and definitely drives down the expected revenue, but it's not piracy lmfao wtf.

It just means on-site banner-advertising is becoming a relatively less-appealing way to finance/promote things. It's still worth doing if the price is right, but you have to simply accept that many people use adblockers, and you can't stop people from modifying how they experience the web.

It's like a milkman whining over refrigeration technology that makes his monetization practices obsolete. Sometimes you have to change with the times instead of whining about how your business model is being kicked in the gonads. We see this today with a lot of very traditionalist, well-financed conglomerates trying to fight change with legislation. It's a fool's game in the end, albeit very annoying during the interim.

Piracy is about copyright infringement, which is totally separate from blocking what shows up on your own screen.

[Mau5]

Re: Guy thinks adblock is piracy

Lmfao at the comment section

Thanks for the Adblock Plus promotion.

Also

Idiotic, if I switch TV channels while the advert are on, am I pirating the broadcast!?

Thanks, the sheer stupidity of this video has made me reinstall AdBlock Pro.

[devonin]

Re: Guy thinks adblock is piracy

Like one of the comments said on the video. You can flip the channel on your tv during commercials so does that make it piracy?

Really? *sigh*

People understand Television even worse than they understand the internet.

You realise that the show was already sold to the network ages ago whether anybody watches it or not right? Advertisers on television pay the network for their ads to appear during certain shows because they feel the viewers are in their demographic. You already paid your cable/dish provider for access to the networks whether you watch them or not.

The analogy is ridiculous.

If you paid for a membership to a site, and then blocked ads from displaying on that site, ads which are in space BOUGHT BY THE AD COMPANY, then you would have an analogy to television.

The situations are otherwise completely different in pretty much every respect.

[Herogashix]

Re: Guy thinks adblock is piracy

Pirating = Stealing.
Adblock = Destroying ads.

Stealing =/= Destroying.

[qqwref]

Re: Guy thinks adblock is piracy

If you ask me, a lot of modern ads are incredibly annoying, and I think this is because of how "eye-catching" they try to be. I get the rationale that having ads will very slowly pay the website owner for their traffic, but for me as a consumer the existence of the ad actually significantly reduces the value of the content to me. If it's a tradeoff between "be annoyed" and "deprive the website owner of a fraction of a cent of revenue" I will choose the latter one every single time.

Especially when you think of the people who do it for live streams. They make money off airing adds between games ect. Simply using adblock subtracts from their expected income for the content you're viewing. Hopefully those of us who watch these don't take money from these people all the time. Because let's face it, the amount of ads to fund a show or stream even is ****ing absurd.

Oh yeah, speaking of this, I've been planning to donate a couple of bucks to some of the streamers I regularly watch. For twitch, at least, I heard they get something like $2 per thousand ad views, so something like $5 would offset quite a lot of unwatched ads.

[Cavernio]

Re: Guy thinks adblock is piracy

Appealing to a sense of right and wrong, if it catches on, will work infinitely better than making legislation or something against blocking ads or some such. Eg: the majority of people will tip at a restaurant, despite not rules or law saying we have to pay extra for something.
I find it sad that simply using the term 'stealing' is enough to make people stop and think about their free downloads as wrong. But yet following the principles of why stealing is wrong in the first place, reasons like this guy's using to say that stopping ads is bad, makes people lol.

Just reiterating my personal stance though, I don't think it's wrong to block ads.

[qqwref]

Re: Guy thinks adblock is piracy

Yeah, as far as that analogy goes, I think a lot of people don't seem to understand WHY stealing is wrong. It's wrong because when you take something from someone else they don't have it anymore, and thus they lose one of their possessions. Piracy, watching a movie on youtube, blocking ads, etc. do not end up with anyone losing an actual thing that they used to have, so the analogy really doesn't make sense. Someone might be losing potential revenue, but then again, isn't that happening whenever you DON'T buy something? And if that's wrong it'd mean we all have to continuously buy every product we see.

[Izzy]

Re: Guy thinks adblock is piracy

If you paid for a membership to a site, and then blocked ads from displaying on that site, ads which are in space BOUGHT BY THE AD COMPANY, then you would have an analogy to television.

The situations are otherwise completely different in pretty much every respect.

Fair enough. It seemed to make sense at the time.

[Reincarnate]

Re: Guy thinks adblock is piracy

Yeah, as far as that analogy goes, I think a lot of people don't seem to understand WHY stealing is wrong. It's wrong because when you take something from someone else they don't have it anymore, and thus they lose one of their possessions. Piracy, watching a movie on youtube, blocking ads, etc. do not end up with anyone losing an actual thing that they used to have, so the analogy really doesn't make sense. Someone might be losing potential revenue, but then again, isn't that happening whenever you DON'T buy something? And if that's wrong it'd mean we all have to continuously buy every product we see.

It's an opportunity-cost argument. Piracy is a different beast than outright stealing because stealing removes the item whereas piracy is just enjoying a copy. The debate boils down to the fact that labor costs are still incurred and efforts are still expended (be it physical or mental capital) to create the media in question, which gets enjoyed by others who don't necessarily feel the need to compensate the creators.

But if there's anything Steam/Netflix/iTunes has shown us, it's that people will pay money if things are fairly priced and worth supporting. Official channels tend to be far superior to that of pirate networks anyway. What gets real old, though, is when lobbyist groups keep inflating the lost revenue figures (it's only lost revenue if someone pirates and doesn't pay whereas they would have without the pirating, but in many cases people who pirate tend to pirate things they wouldn't have bothered buying in the first place).

[xXAll-ProXx]

Re: Guy thinks adblock is piracy

personally speaking, I'm sure I would never click on any of the ads so they are not losing any money from me.