On Ad Blockers

Every time I stumble on a discussion about blocking ads on the web I ask myself if there even is a compelling argument against it. I block ads on the web. Safari is set to prevent cross-site tracking and to hide my IP, I have 1Blocker running on both my Mac and my iPhone and I also have NextDNS enabled. If I can prevent ads and tracking from showing up on my device, I'm gonna do it. Why? Because ads provide literally no value to my life.

But that's the easy part. Things become a lot more complex when you start dealing with all the other factors that are attached to the ads world. For example, you can find this kind of argument:

People who don't pay and block ads are scamming YouTube, or scamming advertisers.

Or even this kind of argument:

And more importantly, they are scamming the content creators. They are not usually a massive company, but working alone, with YouTube revenue as their main income.

Am I scamming YouTube because I block their awful ads? Would I be scamming YouTube if I muted the video and looked at something else while ads were playing? What's the scam here? Who is getting scammed?

One might even argue that I'm doing YouTube a favor and saving them bandwidth by not allowing pointless ads to be served to me. Also, scamming the content creators? If I pay for YouTube Premium I'd still be served in video ads by the creators themselves. Should I be complaining? Am I getting scammed then? I'm paying for no ads after all.

No matter the case, ads on the web will always be tricky and live in this bizarre gray area. And until someone comes up with a really compelling argument for allowing ads I'll keep running ad-blockers because I just can't stand ads.