By: Declan Hertel
Entertainment Editor

This is not going to be a rage-vomit like some of my other pieces. You can put away your hate-ponchos and anger-umbrellas, my children, for you will not be soaked with my vitriol today.

I had an epiphany a few nights ago. I have been using an ad-blocking software since the day I heard that was a thing. Unless airing on a certain February Sunday, nobody likes ads. So downloading a free thing that allowed me to block those suckers was a no-brainer.

I eventually had it turned off on pretty much every website, and most of the ones it remained active on just hadn’t asked me to not use it yet. It’s the right thing to do; these sites rely on ad revenue to keep their services free. As a regular user, I am only hurting myself by blocking their ads.

But the epiphany I had was about the site that I originally downloaded it for: YouTube. YouTube never asked me to turn it off, so I never did. But I wasn’t hurting YouTube by denying the ads, I realized I was hurting the creators.

A lot of folks don’t even think about online video as a viable enterprise, even as creators such as Philip DeFranco and Rooster Teeth have built veritable media empires out of it. It hasn’t yet reached legitimacy, despite it quickly becoming one of our most common ways to get information, not to mention its increasing prevalence as a pastime. But I’ll let you in on a piece of inside knowledge: it ain’t free to make that stuff.

Geoff Ramsey of Rooster Teeth spoke about this on the Off Topic podcast: there’s a weird level of entitlement amongst consumers of internet media, that they’re doing the creators a favor by watching their videos at all. In regards to Pewdiepie, one of the most successful YouTubers ever, they say, “he’s got millions of dollars already and a mansion and whatever.” Ramsey says of this: “Yeah, but you know who doesn’t? My crew.”

And that’s what it is. This is a real industry, people. People are trying to make a living producing content for you to watch, for FREE, and all they ask of you is an extra few seconds of your time, an extra few seconds that allows them to do what they love by giving them money to do it. For the love of independent creators everywhere, please: get rid of your ad-blocker.