Ad Blockers Should Not Be Used

I will argue why people should use ad blocking technology, and why such use should be acceptable. ---Rebuttal--- 1) Perhaps ad blockers do take away ad revenue from certain people, but it's not someone else's decision on what you want to see. It's common for people to change the television channel while commercials are on, and that is not seen as putting someone at risk of going out of business. If anything ad blockers help online entrepreneurs because they will be forced to come up with new ideas on how to get their site or product out to the public. Plain old text and flash ads get boring, ad blockers will force advertisers to become more creative, or risk losing potential customers. 2) Your source stating that ad blockers disable important functions seems a little lacking. They don't even give one example. Ad Block Plus for Firefox is fully user customizable, so if an important thing is blocked the user can easily unblock it. Nothing majorly important has every been blocked for me, please give some examples. 3) Having never analyzed the Newgrounds front page, I headed on over there with my ad blocker in full force. Nothing looked strange or out of place to me. I turned off Ad Block plus and the only new things to appear were a few banner ads, not anything essential to the layout. Same goes for the other sites, having never seen them without ads, they seems just fine. Distortions can easily be fixed, although it's up to the user to do that. Easylist subscriptions even have a special script just for that. "The EasyElement" "Additional leftover space and text-hiding subscription" [1] Also, Ad Block plus has black list capabilities, if it's messing up hotmail the user can simply tell it to never work on hotmail.com. 4) Getting spyware is not the fault of ad blockes, the problem exists between keyboard and chair (the user). Just because some people are idiots and will install adblocker.not-a-trojan.exe does not mean common sense users should stop using ad blockers. 5) You harp on about spyware, but a large amount of spyware comes from advertisements, and users clicking on them. [2] The main ad blocker, ad block plus, is a Firefox extionsion. Firefox has only 21% of the browser market share. [3] If the only way a site can spread is through intrusive ads, then maybe it doesn't deserve a userbase. Perhaps a site should be good enough so it's users what to spread it, and not just rely on ads. ---Arguments--- I'll only state 2 for now. 1) Bandwidth limits We're lucky here in the USA. Most of our ISPs do not limit the amount of bandwidth we use in a month. Although in places around the world like Great Britain, Australia, and even Canada users can't go over a certain download limit or they are charged extra. If I were facing bandwidth caps I certainly would not want to risk having to pay for seeing ads. Ad blocking allows users to control what content they download, so they only get what they are paying for. Today with flash ads, adverts can use up a considerable amount of bandwidth. 2) Mobile Phones: It's hard enough as it is to look at websites on a little phone screen, but it's even harder when you have to wait for a huge ad to load, and scroll past it. Mobile ad blockers fix this problem, and my opponent is suggesting people just deal with it I guess. Mobile users also face heavy bandwidth limits, so why should they be forced to use bandwidth for content they do not want to see? ---Sources--- [1] http://easylist.adblockplus.org... [2] http://tinyurl.com... [3] http://mozillalinks.org...