For those who ignore all ads anyways though, using an ad-block simply takes away some distractions and let's both you and the ad-server use less bandwidth. For people who are immune to advertising anyways, I see no harm to the content producers and advertisers.
You don't actually know yourself to be immune to advertising, though, nor can you. If it were possible for someone to know themselves to be perfectly immune to advertising, you might be right. But that, like knowledge of your courage in the face of death or your absolute quality as a lover, is beyond your ken.
Your argument is like the defense of a man who steals an unpopular toy from the shelf, reasoning from his knowledge of the sales of previous unpopular toys that some will surely be returned to the manufacturer and eventually discarded. Yet his action is still unethical because he doesn't truly know to the degree of certainty the moral test demands.
E.g., a McDonald's ad just wants to make you aware of a new thing on the menu.
I just want publishers that publish this kind of ad to be aware that this is evil. So I block the ads, and they get less money as a result. If the advertisers are allowed to exploit negative externalities, I should be too.
Also, it's not my position that you are obligated to click on ads. Trying to make it seem like I claimed that is uncharitable and I'd appreciate it if you stopped.
He used an analogy that involved theft to illustrate a moral point about the potential versus actual results of actions and the conclusions we can draw from them.
Apparently this was too subtle - and I'll admit I had to stop and think for a moment, so perhaps the analogy was confusing/unclear - but I'm fairly sure that the intent was the moral point, not comparing loss-of-revenue-via-non-shown-page-views directly to loss-of-revenue-due-to-theft-of-physical-product.
If they are making money based on views and you're using an ad blocker, then you're essentially taking away their revenue while giving yourself added convenience and/or less annoyance in the process. You're not directly taking the money (i.e. putting it in your own pocket), but you're transferring the value from one form to another, and it's going from them to you. If it's not the definition of stealing, it's pretty close.
>> "Except I haven't clicked on an ad in 9 years anyways."
This is the thing I find funny in these sorts of debates. Of course you've clicked on ads. You click on them every day. You just don't realize they're ads. Sure, they might not be big flashy image 468x60 banner ads, but you click on links every day. Some of those are paid. They're ads.
If you think you don't click on any paid advertising, you're extremely naive.
However, by selling views to a person like me who doesn't help advertisers at all, CPM eventually goes down. So that argument doesn't really hold water. You want views to go to people who are influenced by the ads, otherwise it's just a waste.
