Andrew is quite firm on this: The widespread use of Adblock will bring down the „free“ internet, as big sites will find themselves unable to pay for necessary expenses like bandwith or the wages of their authors.
If you want a chuckle, take the time to browse through the comments of the post, people are rabid there.
JackLewis.net even states that Adblock is outright theft! And since Adblock is only out for Firefox, he blocks all Firefox users completely. Wow…
But there is a point: If everybody suddenly uses Adblock Plus, a lot of sites may suddenly find themselves without much-needed revenue.
That may be bad (for a short time, until people come up with better schemes to make money), but is it theft?
I doubt it, especially since I never contractually agreed to download, look let alone click on advertisements. They just suddenly appear everywhere when I’m not wanting them. And face it: Even if they aren’t popups, blinking stuff or whatever, I find them obnoxious nonetheless. So they go out. And if a site thinks itself important enough to block out everyone who might be using Adblock, good on them.
Maybe they really are important or worth enough that people will bother to go through the ads to get to them.
Personally, I think that advertisement is simply the wrong way to generate revenue on the web. Should someone really someday sit down to crunch the numbers, he’ll probably find out that, on the whole, advertising on the web costs companies more than the revenue all these ads generate.
I have some ideas on how to prevent adblocking. The basic idea is to selectively encrypt a webpage. Please see:
http://www.killadblock.frihost.net/kab/
There is a live demo that encrypts your HTML!