Bennie Smith, the online advertising network's privacy chief, told ZDNet Australia the popularity of tools like Adblock -- an extension to the Mozilla Firefox browser -- which makes blocking online ads simple was tied to "a negative vibe against advertising in general".
However, only the online arena is able to easily produce and widely distribute such tools, he added.
He said if a similar tool could be produced for newspapers, it would not be accepted by consumers.
"You'd go to your local corner shop and buy the daily paper, and you'd have these large holes where the ads were.
"You'd somehow feel like your 25 cents had not gotten full value," he said.
Part of the Internet's value proposition lies in the provision of large amounts of free content. "But that content is not without cost. And that cost is my eyeballs seeing an ad on a page. Or within an e-mail, or next to my search results, or however it's going to come," Smith explained.
If any browser manufacturer considered implementing an ad-blocking feature as a default option, Smith said they should consider their own position as a marketer [of their own products] and a publisher of content.
"They would be harming their own customer relationships to create a short-term, short-sighted, limited-effectiveness tool," he said. "One that they would probably end up having to withdraw from the market."
If enough people started blocking ads, Smith warned that publishers would start charging for content.
"In an offline world, what would happen in that case is that the 25c newspaper would cost $5," he said.
Oh what a bleeding heart Mr Smith (if that is his real name) is.
He's really worried about his company's bottom line.
If he cared to look around, he would find many successful web sites that run ad-free, or offer ad-free subscription based access that allow those of us who want to live without ads, but get valuable information, all for a low cost.
Perhaps Mr Smith would like to investigate why people are wanting to turn off ads in their browsers. Maybe the ads are too invasive. Maybe flashing graphics make it very hard to read real text elsewhere on the page. Maybe some of the ads that are delivered are not appropriate to the site being visited. Maybe the user doesn't want to have to pay extra download usage charges to download the 80 KB Flash graphic ad on the page with 2 KB of text.