yeah, when youtubers started complaining that adblock is “theft”, this was a logical continuation. like, the purpose of an ad is to inform me about something i probably wish not to be informed about, and for that you get paid. but what if i don’t watch the ad? the system will still think i watched it, you will still get paid, but the advertiser will not have received the product they paid for. is not looking at an ad “theft” too? are we going to have devices measure attention?
this isn’t a new concept, by the way. spotify had an experiment a while back about pausing ads if you mute them (might actually just be how it works now, idk, i decided not to use spotify back when they did this, and when they banned adblock users). there’s also the “verification can” story, which is yes, satire, but it shows that the technology exists. telly’s “free” tv (that has a second screen for ads, and afaik can’t be turned off, just turned into ad-only mode) also has presence detection in the room, and could trivially implement attention detection as well. qualcomm also proposed always-on cameras for phones a few years back, specifically for eye tracking, “for security”, which certainly won’t be used for punishing banner blindness. not on google’s os! they definitely don’t run the largest online ad network after all.
and if you’re against this, but believe adblock is a problem because people aren’t paid for ads if they can’t display the ads, you don’t really care about theft. specifically, you don’t really care if the product advertisers pay for is stolen from them, as long as they’re forced to pay for a worthless return. and sure, fuck the advertising industry, i’m right there with you – but that’s precisely why i do use adblock. there is no alignment here that’s consistent with insisting on propping up that industry but harming its consumer.
but at the end of the day, what is the product advertisers pay for? is it that the ads is technically delivered to you, even if you cast it aside? if they deliver paper-based junk mail, am i immoral to have a robot throw it out, rather than do it manually? or is the product that i read their junk mail? is there a moral imperative to engage in a fair discussion with them, to honestly consider their point? because, at the end of the day, they pay for all this, so where is the line?
my line, in particular, is that they can try on an individual scale, but i’m keeping the robot around to yeet their junk mail, and on a societal scale i would like to see the advertising industry disbanded for the harm it causes in market manipulation, surveillance, and adverse psychological effects. but i also don’t consider adblock “theft” so it’s pretty clear we’re not talking about my set of principles. i really would like to see what a person who considers adblock theft actually thinks about all these topics, beyond a simplistic view about youtube creators. if you expand your ideology to other situations, where does it take you?