Whatever you decide, it is entirely on you. You are the one taking the action and hence you have the moral responsibility, regardless of what information you have found out from wherever or even if someone had suggested it to you. For the former, makers of violent video games or movies are not suggesting that you should act in a violent way. They are not culpable since all they do is provide information. It is you who acts on the information. For the latter on suggestion, an example may clarify.
For instance, you watch an ad telling you about their product. If you go out to buy their product, you cannot say that they forced you to do so. They merely gave you information about their product. Even if they explicitly suggested for you to buy their product, with words like “get it while stocks last,” and you do so, it was you who decided to do so since you had to take action, for instance go to a shop that has the product and then pay for it or go to their website to obtain their product. You may claim, in your own defence, that you are obeying their suggestion, but it was your decision to obey since you had a choice not to obey. This reminds me of how parents may scold their children. When the kid says, “but my friend told me to do it,” a parent might respond, “if your friend told you to eat shit, would you?” Well, would you?
Now that we have clarified that the responsibility of your decision lies on you, we can move to the more interesting part: how are you to make this decision? Let us examine the pros and cons of the matter, starting with why anyone would want to skip ads, be it on youtube, tv, a website, newspaper, in the cinema or any form of media. Let’s start with the pros or benefits.
1) Time is precious, we all know that. We have a limited amount of time to live and so we do not want to waste it if possible. Hence you may wish to save some minutes of your life by avoiding watching ads.
2) You do not want to be persuaded to buy whatever the ad is selling. If you watched the ad and it is an effective one, you may feel compelled by their message and undertake such a purchase. Hence you find it best to avoid such a possibility altogether.
3) Ads irritate you. You came to youtube or the cinema or switched on the tv for some explicit purpose. You certainly didn’t come for the ads. You want to get to your purpose, for instance to learn about philosophy from my channel, or to watch a movie. Ads are just something that comes with the medium and usually you tolerate it though if you could, you would avoid the ads. So perhaps in a movie, you just show up 15 minutes late so you will miss the ads that usually come before the movie proper begins. If you are listening to the radio, maybe you’d switch stations. If you are watching tv, you might go to the toilet or get a snack when ads come on. If you are on youtube, maybe you’d do the same or you’d look for an ad-blocking software.
This leads us to an interesting question. Are adblock apps, browsers, browser extensions, softwares and the like legal? Before I answer this question, I want to make a disclaimer. I do not know if it is legal, I am not a lawyer or legal expert. If you need legal advice, go find one of those. As far as my research on the web has shown, it is not illegal. As far as the entities where such softwares can be downloaded, they are available on the android app store, the firefox browser add on website and the apple app store. There are more, I didn’t investigate every existing avenue. Each of these companies have their own terms and conditions for what apps and softwares are available, and in making them available, I guess those companies don’t think they are breaking any laws since they are in fact making them available to the users of their products.
Let’s consider some further arguments why, if you, as a consumer are going to avoid the ads anyway, how this benefits not just you but also the advertisers. I already talked about you as consumer saving time and possibly money. Advertisers have to pay to have their ads displayed. If you are not even going to be sitting there watching the ad since to avoid it, you went to the toilet, then the advertisers would have paid for their ad in vain. Essentially, if a consumer is never going to finally buy a product based on an ad they see, then the advertisers if possible would not want to waste money advertising to that consumer. So if those who seek out adblockers belong to this group, who are after all not going to finally be successfully advertised to, it in fact saves the advertisers money. This money goes instead to youtube, the tv and radio stations, websites and newspapers etc.
Besides, the internet media companies have countermeasures against ad-blocking. Some websites do not display its content if they detect ad-blockers. Corporations know that ads are annoying. Some companies make money from this very observation. Spotify for instance has its premium package which allows you to have ad-free listening. Guess who else does that? Yes, youtube. Youtube’s premium service’s selling point is for you to, I quote, “watch videos uninterrupted by ads.”[1] Their argument is this: Companies exist to make profits. If they cannot do so, they will go bust and hence cease to exist. Youtube and companies like it make money through advertising and through premium services which sell their customers the avoidance of ads. If they are unable to make any money and have to close down, then the content creators that use their platform will not be able to make money from providing their content on those platforms.
On that note, I am going to segue to cons or disadvantages of blocking ads. Ad monetisation on the internet comes from ads which are often paid based on impressions. What is an impression? According to Google’s Adsense: “an impression is counted for each ad request where at least one ad has begun to download to the user’s device.”[2] This suggests that if ads are blocked, no one, the creator nor youtube is making any money. By the way google owns youtube. By the way, google’s company’s name is actually Alphabet.
So, by blocking ads, you are depriving Alphabet of ad revenue. I guess you might not be overly concerned with that given that they are worth over a trillion dollars. You might however be more concerned that you may be depriving content makers their cut of youtube’s advertising revenues that they are making from hosting their videos on youtube. After all, you realise that content makers ultimately need money to keep making their content and so you might wish to support them, albeit indirectly through allowing advertising. Indeed it is a conundrum. You can of course directly pay these content makers if they have for instance a patreon account or simply make direct payments to them. Some creators have successfully monetised their content in this way.
But if you think small channels are also being deprived of ad revenues since you see ads on their videos anyway, think again. To get into Youtube Partner Program, which is the way for creators to monetise, creators need to have 1000 subscribers and 4000 watch-hours in a year.[3] Small channels are the ones that do not meet these requirements.
Youtube’s terms of service, updated Nov 2020, says:
You grant to YouTube the right to monetize your Content on the Service (and such monetization may include displaying ads on or within Content or charging users a fee for access). This Agreement does not entitle you to any payments […]
For channels not yet in the YouTube Partner Program:
We added this new section to let you know that, starting today we’ll begin slowly rolling out ads on a limited number of videos from channels not in YPP. This means as a creator that’s not in YPP, you may see ads on some of your videos. Since you’re not currently in YPP, you won’t receive a share of the revenue from these ads.[4]
In short, even if you watch ads faithfully on the videos of the small channels, the small channels make nothing. Youtube makes the money though. Forbes magazine reports it this way: ““This is nuts,” says one large YouTube creator with over 3.5 million subscribers. “If you're a small channel, struggling to grow and haven't yet gotten monetization, YouTube will run ads now and take 100% of the profit from your work.””[5]
So ads in fact work against small channels, since viewers may be more hesitant to spend time watching ads to get to their content, given that these small channels seem not as popular as the bigger monetising ones. They do not have the same pull and cachet. Viewers may doubt if they are worth the time. Throw in having to endure ads and viewers might just bypass such small channels altogether.
Another reason to watch ads is that they may give you information you want to act on and buy their products. Ads are an effective way of selling products, it is why they still continue to exist to this day. Companies do need a way to get the information about their products out, ads being one of the usual ways.
In conclusion, there are some advantages and some disadvantages to ad-avoidance. I do not want to load your preference either way. You have to decide for yourself. The moral responsibility is on you since it is you that is taking the action to avoid or not to avoid ads. Anyway, it need not be a binary yes or no to ad-blocking. You can always turn off the ad-blocker if you wish to particularly support one channel through ads and leave it on at other times. At times, you might mind ads a lot, for e.g. when they interrupt a wonderful piece of music or when you are in bed listening to a video as I do sometimes. At times, you are ok with ads. So there are a whole spectrum of possibilities on this. Anyway, I hope this discussion has at least given you some room for thought.
This series of videos on ad-blocking isn’t my usual content on philosophy. Or is it? Perhaps this exploration of whether one should or should not use ad-blockers on youtube is a demonstration of how philosophy intersects with real-life, where we often have to make moral decision in murky circumstances and to reason about what is involved. Whatever it is, we have to decide one way or another. Even doing nothing is a decision. Mine is certainly not the last word on this. I’d love to hear from you, please feel free to leave a comment and please like, share and subscribe to the Philosophical Bachelor. Thank you.
Other interesting related info:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/adblock-plus-scores-big-legal-win-it-doesnt-break-antitrust-law-court-rules/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/premium
[2] https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/6157410?hl=en
[3] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72851?hl=en
[4] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/83733719/updates-to-youtube%E2%80%99s-terms-of-service-november-%E2%80%9820?hl=en&msgid=83733719
[5] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/11/18/youtube-will-now-show-ads-on-all-videos-even-if-creators-dont-want-them/?sh=9430e5c49130
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