On the heels of the recent piracy thread I thought it might be interesting to see how blender artists feel about ad-blocking.
Recently I’ve found ad-blocking making its way into headlines suggesting that ad-blockers and users of such could be ultimately responsible for a switch away from free, read ad-supported, services to paid/subscription based services. Content suppliers seem to be under the impression that blocking their ads is essentially theft because the services they provide are not actually free, there is an agreement that they supply the service and/or content in exchange for the viewing of ads and not viewing those ads constitutes a breach of the agreement. In other words they are spending their time creating and/or supplying content and they believe they should be paid for that work. Using an ad-blocker means their services are being used by people who are not paying them for those services, people who might otherwise pay them if they were not using an ad-blocker.
So what do you think, does ad-blocking constitute theft? Will ad-blocking lead to the downfall of free services and lead to a primarily subscription dominated internet? Does ad-blocking hurt content/service providers?