Lichess: Block Ads and Trackers

Now, I get that you're probably coming at this from "But hosting costs money and advertising is a way to recuperate the cost, so visiting the site but blocking ads is leeching bandwidth from the host without providing value back in the form of ad revenue".

But this doesn't hold up. All the cards are held by the content provider. If they -actually- have a problem with this, they have ways to stop it.

1. A server will always serve a request. That's it's job. So there's some unavoidable up-front cost to being a server on the internet.

2. But once it gets the request, it might serve a response that executes client-side Javascript that detects that an ad-blocker is running. At this point the content provider has a decision. They could block the requester. For example, redirect to a "Disable your adblocker" page. Or even in extreme cases blacklist the IP the request came from (though practically this doesn't happen). Heck, if things devolved into an arms race around ad-blocking detection, you could probably detect this server-side with some mechanism around serving a request to a browser while at the same time issuing a request to an ad provider to see if they received a corresponding ad content request within a certain window and if not, you know the ad was effectively blocked.

Ultimately it's not an obligation to accept ads. It's the content provider's prerogative to decide to deny service to ad-blocking clients, but realistically most content providers want traffic even if it's not generating ad revenue because of those sweet engagement metrics. If they don't, they have the tools to stop serving those requests.

1. Companies selling paid products see ads as an additional revenue and not a way of filling a hole in the budget caused by price reductions. The price wasn’t reduced. That’s a fairy tale.

2. Even if (1) wasn’t true, the consumer seeing ads ends up spending more. They pay for the goods and services being advertised. If they didn’t spend more the whole ad business model wouldn’t work.

In my ideal, advertising and marketing are about really understanding what the other party needs and finding a truly mutually beneficial agreement that actually generates value through exchange (A has X but values Y more highly, B has Y but values X more highly, simply by the act of exchange, value is generated).

I was even pro-tracking at one point because the more you know about people, the better you can understand their needs so the better you can offer them something they'll value. In the abstract, I still think there's something here. But it has to be done responsibly and with a user-before-profit mindset.

By contrast, ad companies have time and again proven themselves irresponsible with this information, e.g. selling it to shady groups.

Except for, you know, allowing those websites to exist in the first place? Ads and data are nothing but a form of payment, the gold or salt of the internet age.

The alternative to ads isn't no ads, it's paywalls and subscriptions. If ads didn't exist or weren't as accurate as they can be with invasive tracking, we'd have far less content out there, and most of the existing content would be locked behind paywalls, making search engines even more useless than they already are. There would be no free video hosting on Youtube, no free music on Spotify, no free educational resources for those who can't afford books, and calling your friends on another continent would still be a few dollars per minute. The internet would be a much sadder place even if you were rich, and almost completely inaccessible to you if you were poor (or a teenager without a bank account / a resident of a sanctioned country / an undocumented and unbanked immigrant.)

Ad Blocking is a "tragedy of the commons" problem, your internet experience is better if you do it than if you don't, but if 100% of users were to start successfully blocking ads everywhere, the experience for those same users would quickly degrade.