Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Yes, it is still useful for business to utilise online advertising. Take AdWords for instance, you pay only for clicks through to your site. Users that block ads aren't likely to be the ones clicking the advertisements, and you don't pay for them. I'd say it doesn't affect business, it's probably better actually - you don't pay for visitors that aren't going to be interested.
Abandoning an online advertisement strategy because some people block them is like deciding against billboards because some people are blind.
Hate to put ideas in their heads but if companies really cared about making sure their ads are seen, I'm sure there is a way on the backend to check that a browser at least requests the ad from the server before delivering the content part of the page. I don't mean interstitials, I mean as the page is loading, the server checks that you've requested banner.gif before it gives you all the paragraphs in the article.
With css or javascript/DOM you can even position the text/ads however you like regardsless of the order they are downloaded.
Obviously, one could write a browser plug-in that faked a banner ad request, but you've at least taken away the download-speedup incentive part of the motivation for ad-blocking.
Most Slashdotters are knowledgable enough to use ad-blockers with a browser like Firefox. Have you heard anything about CowboyNeal going broke?
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
The point is that people who go out of their way to avoid ads (ie, by using adblock or whatever) are the same people who wouldn't click on them ANYWAY.
From a business point of view, its a non-issue since they weren't going to get that person anyway.
From the consumer point of view, they're not blocking specific types of ads, they're blocking ALL adds (or at least as many as they can) -- thats their goal, and adblock and the like are pretty good at it.