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I don't use ad blockers on YouTube because the creators that I watch on YouTube are people who I actually care about. I watch content on YouTube from real people who I want to be able to profit off of me watching their video. Ad blockers are effectively piracy, your taking the content without the agreed upon price, in this case, the price of the content is the ads.
And I don't make that comparison to convince anyone that they shouldn't use an ad blocker, I just think the decision of where to use ad blockers should be made with the understanding that you are pirating any content that you consume while using an ad blocker. Are you willing to pirate something from some random mega corporation? I am. Are willing to pirate content from this niche 3D printing YouTube content creator that you enjoy? I'm not.
As a default, I do use an ad blocker, but I will disable the ad blocker for any website that I can trust enough to not have malicious ads, especially websites that i want to financially support. Because for me all it means is sacrificing a little bit of bandwidth to load the ad that I'm just going to ignore anyway.
You say you'll disable the ad blocker for sites that don't push malicious ads? I've reported half a dozen deepfake "investment" ads on YouTube in the last couple of months, and they have done nothing about it. The ads YouTube pushes are horrible!
People advertising shady things is not the same thing as a malicious ad, at least not in the context of the point I'm trying to make. By malicious ad I'm referring to those things that pretend to not be an ad at all, they pretend to be the download button or a notification of an unread message, or something along those lines.
I may not be using the terminology exactly right, but that's the kind of thing I'm referring to. And YouTube does. A YouTube does a perfectly fine job at being transparent when something is an advertisement and when it's organic content. They're not maliciously being deceptive at what is an ad and what isn't.
At what point was a price agreed upon?
The price was agreed upon in the same way that the price in the grocery store is agreed upon.
The content provider set the price, in this case, the price being consuming an advertisement.
To be totally clear, I absolutely advocate for piracy in some situations, I'm not going to get into the weeds and talk about the specifics when I do or do not advocate for it, but to extend upon the grocery store analogy, there are also some situations where I would absolutely advocate for someone to steal from the grocery store. And I'm not going to get into the weeds and talk about the specifics for when I do or do not advocate for that either. The point though is by calling ad blocking piracy I'm not making a moral judgment on whether or not it is right or wrong, I'm just pointing out that it is functionally the exact same thing.
Usually when you click on 'I Agree'
ToS holds no power in a court. Real agreement do.
We're not talking about what holds power in a court, we're talking about functional reality.
What you can get away with on a technicality in court is irrelevant to whether or not it's piracy.
By a legal definition, no, ad blocking is probably not piracy. I'm no lawyer but I would wager that Piracy is probably more strictly defined than that. My point though is that it is functionally the exact same thing as piracy.
Ad supported content is distributed based on the advertising income paying for the distribution. If you are blocking that advertising in a way that prevents compensation to the content creator you are consuming that content without the creator getting paid the price that they set for the content.
I cleanse my conscience by supporting many of them on Patreon.
Accidentally clicking on clickbait without an adblocker directly results in a spammer getting money, and that just makes me feel like crap. There's so much spam out there that wouldn't exist without ads, which makes it harder for quality creators to get attention and fair compensation. I feel I can only engage with the internet ethically by refusing to participate in the ad economy.
It sucks that alternative payment models like Brave's "Basic Attention Token" (or a fairer alternative) never got popular. The idea was to track the creators of websites/videos/etc. you visit and automatically split your monthly donation between them. IIRC it was proportional to the number of ads blocked for each creator, but you could tweak creators' multipliers to deny profit to spam and reward higher-quality creators. I'd also accept microtransactions for individual videos, news articles, etc. but no platforms for these exist because the big players in internet monetization are all so focused on ads.
Yes! This is exactly the kind of thing I'd rather see too. More directly financing the creators you enjoy.