-1
Ad-blocking is piracy, and that's okay
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2026
-1 points (42.9% liked)
Unpopular Opinion
8865 readers
11 users here now
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
6. Defend your opinion
This is a bit of a mix of rules 4 and 5 to help foster higher quality posts. You are expected to defend your unpopular opinion in the post body. We don't expect a whole manifesto (please, no manifestos), but you should at least provide some details as to why you hold the position you do.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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!