Blocking ads is stealing?

[Acorn]

Ha!! I saw that when it was first posted. Suuuure.....seriously, you can't survive on the net without at least one ad blocker these days. Honestly, you'd be inundated, your computer would just jam up or at least mine would. And it's not just about whether they're annoying, many of them contain coding that tracks you unless you prevent them from loading.

But look closer at Clinger's words. Notice how robotic they are? It's like he's reciting it rather than stating his opinion. Likely he has to kowtow to his own sponsors, who'd be most miffed if they saw him saying, "Firefox has an excellent ad blocker! I recommend them to anyone who wants to use our boards but not put up with our sponsors' annoying banners."

 

[Battou]

I believe it to be very true. People do have every right to block these ads, but at the same time webmasters have every right to block those who block these ads. I co-admin a site that uses an ad-blocker ban, this ban was put into place because the site is entirely ad sponsor funded. With the ad blocker ban in place the site only brings in roughly two to three hundred dollars a month on ads that pay out for views not clicks. Now considering this site costs over a thousand dollars a month to keep up and running, we are already loosing money, allowing those ads to be blocked would cut that in half at the very least. As it stands the only thing keeping us alive is the ads on the red headed stepchild site we decided to create to comply with sponsor demands pertaining adult themed artworks. In other words we are being forced to steal money from the porn industry to keep out children friendly art site alive. Yeah, I firmly believe blocking ads is stealing money from sites, especially when it's a site that minimizes the number of ads on each page and does not go about disrupting users browsing to shove an ad in their face.