Um sorry about that

Over the weekend Ars Technica put up an article about why ad blocking software is killing good sights.  There basic premise is that it is my fault that they don't get money when I block advertising and that it stealing content.  At first I felt a little bad.  But you know what I hate adds....and sometimes they are annoying  (I toggled my adblocker off, looked at the site and turned it back on again)

Then Techdirt had a great article "Don't Blame Your Community: Ad Blocking is Not Killing Any Sites"
Essentially saying that if your Ads are driving people away you need to look at ads as the problem not the person leaving.  In fact there was this great quote:

Mike Markson recently wrote up a blog post for entrepreneurs, talking about how every entrepreneur needs to learn the lesson that, whatever doesn't go right is your fault. It's a tough lesson for people (especially entrepreneurs) to learn. If you can't raise money, don't blame the investors. You were the one who failed to convince them. If you can't make sales, don't blame the sales people. You either hired the wrong sales people or didn't put together a compelling enough pitch or didn't have a good enough product. It's your responsibility as an entrepreneur to fix things.

Which I think is a good reminder to everyone that likes to pass the buck, but really we should find a solution over someone to blame.

Ok, so what did I do?   I've turned off the ad blocking in my Google Reader.  So if your RSS reader has ads I will see them.... because in all honesty I want to support great sites like Ars Technica and TechDirt.    And when the ads get annoying I will just stop reading that RSS feed.