nxnjz wroteYou are absolutely right and I did think about this. Eventually, it leads to a moral dilemma: I, as a consumer in this scenario, have the right to decide what I want to download; While platforms/advertisers/content creators/developers have a right to display ads.
(As a side note, I do pay for a small number of ad-free versions like anghami) edit: irrelevant to this discussion
Breaking this down into a battle for primitive rights only serves to further complicate a very simple, straightforward matter.
1) Web content hosts serve you content for free.
2) These hosts, to cover their costs / make a profit, serve you ads.
3) The hosts expect that you see the ads and that a certain percentage of users would click through, generating ad revenue.
4) You choose to block those ads. While the hosts still expects you to be receiving (and seeing) those ads, you are not. You never click through. When hosts figure out a way to detect ad blockers, they can easily stop you from seeing their free content. If they did not, then that means they either did not equip themselves for this or simply did not detect your usage of an ad blocker.
5) You get web content that is only for free *because* of potential ad revenue for free with no strings attached.
6) The hosts are deprived of their ad revenue often without which they cannot even cover their costs, let alone have an incentive to bring you free web content without anything in return.
Tell me how this is fair.
I don't like to summon arguments that stem from verstehen, but I'll entertain this now: if you were a web host and your audience was primarily that which would not pay for your content, expecting it, as with *everything on the web*, to be free (a delusion spun about by the state of the early web), and you instead chose to go for advertisements - on a scale of 1 to 10, how much would you appreciate it if a significant portion of your userbase ended up blocking out your ads yet leeching your *free* web content?