Does Ad Blocking Affect Your Business?

yocto wonders: "From the individual's point of view we already know why you block adverts, but not from a business perspective. What is the impact on your business when your company's ads are blocked by using an ad blocker or a script blocker? How is your company's exposure or revenue affected by this? Is it still worth your effort to make use of online ads?"

Comments

Would people who block ads actually buy?

[kaizokunami]

I think most people who are savvy enough to block ads would not click an ad banner anyway. Today we have to worry about fake websites phishing for our account information, so if I'm interested enough in your product, I'm going to go to Google, do some research, and make sure I'm going directly to your website rather than click an ad.

Re:forced ad serves?

[Drachemorder]

Yeah, I've seen pages that say "You're blocking our ads. You have to load them before we'll let you see the page."

Needless to say, I left pretty quickly. Forcing me to view ads is only going to make me not want to buy the advertised products even more than I already don't want to.

Re:It does not because almost nobody uses ad block

[coyotecult]

There are still concerns and problems with ads on webpages.

They're vectors for adware and spyware exploiting vulnerabilities to install themselves, and it can happen even if the owners of a website are pretty diligent in trying to screen the ads for security. (Example.)

Too many rich media ads, or badly coded ones, on a webpage can use up way too much CPU power and affect the computer's performance.

In places where ISPs often have monthly bandwidth caps (I hear Australian surfers talk about those, for instance), downloading ads can feel like wasting bandwidth.

For the larger ad networks, ads are always trying to set cookies, and those cookies can be used to track you across many websites, and some people do not want to be tracked.

Stupid Question

[Hans Lehmann]

It's like asking how your business is affected by all the people the don't buy the newspapers in which you've placed an ad. "My business is plummeting, and it's all the fault of those people that don't want to buy my product!"

Why to let ad-block work?

[alexgieg]

It's relatively easy to work around ad-blocking plugins: simply make your ads be static images, never in flash or animated gifs, with slightly variable height and width, random names, in random paths, loading from the same server the main page is served, and from the exact same directory, never surrounding it by any specially-named frame, and never putting it into the exact same place inside a page. Doing these things would pretty much defeat Firefox's AdBlock addon as well as any size-based ad-blocker. They'll also work agains most, if not all, bayesian ad-blockers (if they exist, I'm not sure they do) if you don't forget to follow the exact same rules for all non-ad images in your web site.

If major ad-filled sites aren't following these trivial tricks, I'm pretty sure they don't see adblocking as a big problem. They probably think those 1% or 2% of geek visitors who block ads aren't statistically significant.

But if most people started using ad-blocked, be sure the above tricks would start being applied in a lot of places. And as a result ad-blocking development would become a field of research as much complicated, if not more, than spam blocking. It would reach a point where you would have to train a lot a filter for working in a given site, and deal with false positives and negative for a good amount of time, until that site you want ad-free was working as expected.

Re:Why to let ad-block work?

[pimpimpim]

Your point is already proven by the stress that a lot of advertizing people put on disabling ad-skipping on digitally recorded TV (tivo and the likes). In those cases, a majority of people are inclined to use this technology, and advertizers start worrying.

That said, a lot of ads on the internet are pretty respectable now, except for the flash popups that fill your whole screen, but luckily they are pretty rare. Compared to TV ads, it's a heaven on the internet. I stopped watching the blockbuster movies on the commercial channels in germany because a 1.5 hour movie would take almost more than 2 hours due to the intermittent ads at every 15 minutes, of which most are the same anyway. Sometimes the last 15 seconds of the movie from before the ad are repeated, which feels like having my brain killed :( It is just too exhausting too watch TV this way, and I'm not even mentioning the 'information bars' that pop up to fill a fifth of the screen during a movie. I hope they won't start putting ads to be shown during DVDs now, because they are my only source of movies at the moment.

So, I didn't install an add blocker, but have pop-up protection, and that keeps my life in the internet pretty happy. If the ads would get more invasive, the majority will probably start looking for ad blockers, and it will become a problem of the advertizers. Just lets hope they will solve it with common sense (nicer ads) instead of forcing ad-blocking to be outlawed due to ip-infringement, for anti-terrorism, or whatever they come up with.

Either I'm an idiot or the ad men are

[jimicus]

To my mind, if someone has gone to the trouble to block adverts (and trouble it is - no browser does so by default), it implies that they have no interest whatsoever in them.

It therefore follows that they probably have even less interest in buying a specific product on the strength of its advert. So what's the point in even chasing such people?

Re:Either I'm an idiot or the ad men are

[tehshen]

To my mind, if someone has gone to the trouble to block adverts (and trouble it is - no browser does so by default), it implies that they have no interest whatsoever in them.

No, not always.

I don't mind ads that much. Even if they're stupid, flashy, click here now, I can still sweep them to the side and ignore them, and just read the page I went to. Example: this dictionary site has a few banners, but the list of meanings for "spoon" is still right in front of me to read.

What irks me and makes me go somewhere else is when you link to an old, overloaded ad server that makes me wait about ten seconds before I can see the rest of the page. (boingboing is a bad offender here). Worse than that, I've seen ads that spill over into the text, load in front of the text; some even force you to have a "grace period" for the ad (user friendly?). I don't see why I should wait and see that a site is worthless when I can just block all obnoxious ads at the hosts level.

The site I'm working on at the moment hosts its ads itself. Fast-loading, and relevant, that's the way it should be.