The main difference is that my computer takes an active roll in the process of showing me an ad. Traditional advertising is there whether I look at it or not. Websites not making money on their content is their problem not mine. If they can’t make money on traditional advertising then they’ll go bankrupt or find a new way to generate income. I didn’t sign a contract to agree to be served ads and have no obligation to not block them.
Am I obligated to look at every billboard by the road or can I not get up and leave or at least mute commercials on TV? Why should I have my computer use my bandwidth against my data cap so that a company paying someone other than me can show me an ad?
The way I see it is that the host is getting paid for giving the opportunity to show an ad. The exchange is between the company hosting the content and the company advertising the product, not the end user.
People absolutely block ads on TVs, DVRs have been around for ages and auto ad skipping has been a feature since at least 2002. Well before then people were fast forwarding through commercials or simply muting them. Of course with live TV you can’t skip because the content is timed to commercial breaks but you don’t have to consume the commercials shown in the breaks.
What I would consider traditional advertising would be any clearly separate banner, pop up, intermediate page etc placed around the main content, think commercials on TV as opposed to the conspicuous coke being drunk in the movie. There’s a limitless number of ways to monetize content, many of which an ad blocker is useless against. I can block a banner ad, it’s way harder to block a paid review.
As far as I am concerned content online is easily replaceable, the only site that I think I would genuinely miss if it went away would be wikipedia and I do donate to them. No matter what you or I do, web content will survive and the market will evolve new ways to separate us from our money.
As a question, how do you feel about data mining and tracking? Selling identifiable user data is one of the most common ways to monetize a website and is generally unintrusive to a user’s experience while using the site. Would it be amoral for a user to try to eliminate or at least reduce the data they allow a website to collect? What about providing deliberately false data?