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The Ethics of Ad-blocking

This blog post aims to discuss the ethics of blocking ads. I am not an ethicist and do not wish to cast judgement upon anyone or portray myself as morally superior. I wish to discuss this topic in an accessible way that doesn’t come off as a boring attempt at academic discourse. To do so, I want to frame this topic as the questions, “who does blocking ads harm?” and “are advertisements harmful to consumers?” These will give us concrete questions which we can attempt to answer. This can then inform you if you feel like blocking ads is worth the harm it may bring to someone or if advertisements are harmful to you.

How does ad blocking and online advertising work?

To start off, we can first define what it means to block an ad. This simply means that a user has some sort of method they use to prevent themselves from having ads displayed to them when browsing the web. Blocking an ad using a browser plugin for example works by not displaying the advertisement on your screen. There are other ways this can be done, such as a pi-hole, but this means when you visit a new site with an ad blocker, the ads still load but are caught by the browser extension in this case and not shown to you. For example, see this article where I show how to unshittify your web browser which in essence blocks ads while browsing the web.

The next question which comes to mind is “how do ads work online?” According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, online ads work in two ways – using contextual ads and or personalized ads. A contextual ad is when an advertiser places relevant advertisements to search terms in search engines like Google through advertisement networks or to relevant websites. What is an advertisement network?

According to Wikipedia, an advertisement network can be defined as, “An online advertising network or ad network is a company that connects advertisers to websites that want to host advertisements. The key function of an ad network is an aggregation of ad supply from publishers and matching it with the advertiser’s demand.”

For example, when you Google the term “books,” or anything you buy online, a book publisher in this case may pay an advertisement network who works with Google to display ad search results to come up before the search engine’s algorithmically found websites. Or the ad network might find relevant book blogging sites to put those ads onto. 

The second way advertisements work are personalized ads. These are the ads that take a lot of heat and rightfully so. Advertisers work with ad networks to display ads on websites or through search engines through personal data such as location or even user activity on the web. This is that feeling we all get when we feel like we are being watched. When I Google restaurants near me and then later browse something else and get an ad for frozen pizza on an unrelated website, this is personalized advertising. 

This is worrisome. Even for those who have nothing to hide. I don’t want a massive technology conglomerate knowing what time of the day I get hungry, even if it’s only seen by algorithms. Some people may be okay with this and that’s okay, but personally it feels intrusive. There are ways to stay somewhat anonymous on the web to prevent this sort of tracking, such as using a vpn, privacy plugins, secure browsers, and not logging into websites, but this goes outside of the scope of this post and will be covered in the future.

Blocking ads then seems like a no brainer. I use the methods I showed in my previous how-to article along with a pi-hole. But I still wonder who does this hurt then? Are companies hurt by you not seeing advertisements they pay for you to see? What about small businesses who use these methods to get their products out there? What about the creators who rely on ad revenue for income? Inversely, how are consumers hurt by advertisements? Is it okay to block ads even if companies and creators are losing money? I will attempt to explore these questions below.

Who is hurt by ad blocking?

According to Vox, many large businesses who also rely on traditional advertising are not impacted much by ad blocking usage. They have found other ways to make up for this such as using native ads in their applications. For example, my pi-hole is a network wide ad blocker set up on an old raspberry pi. It works differently from an ad-blocker by blocking the domain name the ad comes from from a blacklist before it can even load. But when I watch YouTube on my tv, this still doesn’t block ads because the ads are native to the application. If I tried blocking these ads, I would be blocking YouTube since the videos and ads come from the same domain or application in this example.

In the article, Vox mentions that mid-size companies may be the ones who are impacted by this as many may rely on large online advertisement campaigns unlike small businesses who may not even have the budget for this or large businesses who have many ways to reach potential consumers. Ad blocking has steadily risen and large companies have started incorporating other ways to reach consumers. In an ever and rapidly changing world, should these mid-size companies adopt these methods as well? Or should consumers feel guilty about possibly harming them? This seems up to the individual to decide. Am I morally wrong for shopping at Walmart instead of supporting a local mid-size grocery chain that’s more expensive?

Companies are not the only ones impacted by ad-blocking, what about content creators who heavily rely on ad-revenue for income? According to Insights Success, many creators do lose possible income from this but have already turned to other methods to make up for this lost revenue. For example, if you have watched pretty much any YouTube video in the past 2-3 years, how often are the videos just ads themself or contain sponsored content in the middle of the video? Also how many creators also have other subscriptions such as Patreon or using affiliate links for products?

It seems like there is a bit of a tug of war going on. Consumers are using ad blockers and don’t  plan on stopping, so the advertisement industry and content creators have adopted new methods to make up for lost revenue. Fifteen years ago it may have been more of a debate when there was more of a direct impact. But in 2025, it seems like ad-blocking really isn’t doing much damage. 

How are consumers hurt by online advertisements?

What about the damage advertisements cause consumers though? Historically advertising has not always been on the right side of history. Two quick examples are predatory payday loan lenders targeting vulnerable low income communities (which is happening currently on TikTok as well) and cigarette companies targeting black Americans with menthol cigarettes. Advertising in and of itself is already morally grey. On top of this they can also use a bunch of manipulative methods to get people to buy stuff they don’t really need.

This combined with modern day practices of online advertising that may breach privacy for some users or even contain misinformation to sway how people think politically may give many users, including myself, reasons to justify how using an ad blocker outweighs the potential harm it may cause against creators and businesses.

Conclusion

We’ve explored how online advertising works, how blocking ads works, how businesses and creators are harmed by ad blocking and how users are harmed by ads. I personally believe that the reasons to block ads outweigh the harms it can possibly cause businesses and creators. However, I don’t want this article to tell you how to think. Let the questions I’ve asked throughout the article allow you to think about your own feelings and thoughts about this. Make sure to see other sources as well and take this with a pinch of salt since I surely have bias that was included in this article.

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