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Ad-blocking is piracy, and that's okay
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2026
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Unpopular Opinion
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thing is with ads you can block, the advertiser is not paying if the ad is blocked.
i agree that taking a restroom break while an ad is showing is not piracy. that's not blocking the ad, though.
I'll try to argue about something I know little about. Don't advertisers pay for ads served? Don't many ad blockers work by hiding the ad from view, like making it's size 0x0? On my older devices, I can see the ad show up, then disappear. Doesn't that then imply that the advertiser must pay for the ad eve though it does not show on my device?
Going down the rabbit hole, doesn't that then also imply that people using assistive technologies like a screen reader for the visually impaired are actually stealing content?
https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/95614/do-ad-impressions-count-if-the-user-is-using-an-adblocker summarizes Google Ads's documentation at https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/141811?hl=en (TL;DR: pay depends on whether a script/request attached to the ad element is performed).
It's true that different adblockers do different things, but the most popular ones do block the requests too. One of the most popular arguments for adblocking is performance and bandwidth. If we only hid the ad from view without doing that, we would not get the performance and bandwidth savings that adblock brings. So, µBO blocks the requests.
You can confirm yourself whether the request is blocked by searching "ad" (or "doubleclick" specifically for DoubleClick Ads, which are the majority of Google Ads) in your browser DevTools's "Network" tab. Compare when the adblocker is off vs. on; for me with µBO the majority of requests aren't even attempted and disappear when their entire element is ad-blocked, and in these cases the pay script doesn't load either. The screenshot above only shows some requests that were attempted and blocked.
No, screen readers would still read ads. Just having the screenreader move to the next element is the same as scrolling past the ad. The difference is that if the advertiser doesn't give alt-text, the content can become nonsensical. But the advertiser still pays.
You can approximately check an ad's text for a screenreader with Firefox DevTools's "Inspect accessibility properties" feature.
Excellent write up!
thank you!