Blocking Ads equates to theft or Censorship

Another one for the weird department today, is a web site owner that is now actively blocking Firefox users because of an ad blocker program add on that users can download. Technically if you are MySpace, we could care less, there are far too many ads, they are annoying, and this is why it gets the nickname ugly space. Many sites that emulate the whole thing, too many ads, way too MySpace for our tastes, as well as many Adsense ready or splog sites pretty much so do the same thing, far too many ads, is it any wonder then that people will take action and use and ad blocker?

Advertising can be annoying if overdone, but then on the other hand small sites like ours, or others that rely on advertising revenue to offset costs are also being blocked as well. While we do not equate it to theft, heck our content, and many others content is on the internet already, if not ripped by RSS Reader to Web software, splogs, and an assortment of other evils.

If you rip our stuff, put it on your site, do not link back and don’t credit us, that is theft. If you do not see our ads, you cannot click on them if you find them interesting, we make no money, but that is the gamble with on line ads anyways. On the other hand, with the click through rate of less than 1%, and our Firefox users making up some 30% of visitors, we just do not see where we are out much in the first place.

Firefox users who go to http://jacklewis.net/weblog/ are redirected to Why Firefox is Blocked, which says the Adblock Plus extension undercuts Web sites dependant on advertising revenue. “Accessing the content while blocking the ads therefore would be no less than stealing,” wrote Danny Carlton, a Web site designer and author, who runs both sites. JackLewis.net is his personal blog site. “Millions of hard working people are being robbed of their time and effort by this type of software,” he added in a posting on the Why Firefox is Blocked Web site. Source: Infoworld

Jack Lewis has the right to do what he wants to do with his web site that is his thing. Then Firefox users are free not to visit his site as well. Lets see, ban Firefox users because they have an ad blocker and won’t click on ads, or allow Firefox users on the site with the ad blocker, they won’t see the ads, nor click on them, he is pretty much so at status quo. Even if he thinks he is fighting a censorship issue, this is one battle that is going to cost him in the longer run, regardless of motivations.

The other reality is that Jack is going to lose traffic, which is more important, as more traffic equates to the idea of sponsorship, which will offset any loss of revenue by people using the Firefox ad blocking add-on.

Either way, Jack has put himself into a grim situation, and there is really no way for him to win this one, but it is his web site, and he can do anything he wants to do with it. Of an important note, when we went to his site using Firefox his block screen states:

IMPORTANT NOTE: The Digg entry is FALSE!! No where do we assert that “since Firefox users have the ability to block ads, they must be thieves and must be blocked.” AdBlockPlus denies site owners the freedom to block AdBlockPlus users, therefore all FireFox users (except those using IETab) are blocked. It’s a simple matter of opposing the censorship on the part of AdBlockPlus and therefore the support offered to them by Mozilla. Source: Jack

You can only see this screen in Firefox, but he is calling it a censorship issue, not a theft issue, yet everyone is reporting it as a theft issue, have to wait and see how this one works out.