There is a meme going on after Noam Cohen wrote an article on NY Times highlighting some of the moral claims about online advertising. I don’t buy the moral claims about ad blocking software like Adblock Plus. I am not against online advertising. I do understand that it is one of the major reasons why we get most of our web content for free. However, if someone develops a technology to block advertisement, it should be countered with better ad serving methodologies (or rather better ad experience) or better business models. Instead, putting moral spins on ad blocking software is not correct. I don’t believe in making moral or legal threats to any technological innovation, even if it is disruptive to business models. One should beat it with a better technology or business model or both.

My opinion on this issue follows from my opinions on DRM in the music industry. I am against DRM per se but, more importantly, I am against using legal means to stop any DRM breaking technologies. I always felt that music industry should find better technologies to encrypt the music or, even better, totally remove DRM and look for alternative business models. I would use the same arguments in the case of online web advertising too. The companies offering content on the web should

• figure out fool proof ad serving technologies that can beat such ad blockers. They have to keep innovating on the ad technology front.
• figure out ways to make the ads more interesting to users so that they don’t resort to such ad blocking tools in the first place. It means adding value through ads along with content. A win-win situation for the advertiser as well as website visitors.
• figure out better business models to pay for content including freemium models, micro payment models, etc..

Nicholas Carr makes a very good comparison between online ads and television ads. He says

When a publisher or other supplier makes a decision to give something away free and to make money indirectly, by selling ads, the supplier and the advertiser are the ones who assume the risk that the ad will not reach its target. The reader or viewer never has an obligation to look at or to click on or even to load an advertisement. It’s completely discretionary. If I’m watching, say, Monday Night Football, and every time there’s a commercial break I run out of the room to either (a) grab a beer or (b) take a whiz, I am doing absolutely nothing wrong. The same goes for blocking Internet ads.

This is exactly the case. I can extend this to free newspapers that rely entirely on ads (Well, I won’t deviate much from my point if I included all the newspapers into this discussion). The risks, in the case of such newspapers, are with content publishers and advertisers. It is not with readers. The reader can just throw away ad pages and just read the content without even looking at the ads. The users of internet sites can do the same by ignoring the ads by either not looking at them (or not clicking them) or they can resort to technology to block out ads they don’t want to see. The moral argument against such ad blocking software are just attempts to kill new technologies that disrupts the existing business models. The moral arguments should not be used to cover up the inertia on the part of internet business communities, to either develop better advertising experience (mechanism) and/or better business models. What do you think about this issue? If you agree with my line of thinking, what do you think are the options in front of companies offering content through web?