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.
I run a small (~500,000 PV/month) website with a free language trainer. The business model (which does not work) is based on ads, so I was concerned if people would filter out the ads. All of the pages on the site show either google ads or a single standard size non-flash banner, which is trivial to filter out. Some of the banners are in iframes and come from other sites, some come from our server. And as far as I can tell from the logs, the number of pageviews roughly equals the number of banner views. Now maybe all our users use ad blockers that actually load the banner, but do not display it, but I doubt it. Most of the users are from German speaking countries, so there may be a cultural difference, but I don't see any different behavior from the English speaking users either.
So I assume that most users are like me: I block pop-ups, because they annoy the hell out of me. If a site uses flash to aggressively, I turn on the flash blocker, but usually I do not because it is to often required for display or navigation and I'm to lazy to switch it on on demand. I don't mind most of the ads, since I realize they finance the content I'm watching.
Here at slashdot it always seems like almost everybody is blocking ads, but I think that the slashdot crowd is very untypical, ad blocking (apart from pop up blocking, which all browsers support directly) is not a mainstream thing.
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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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.
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.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Well, you can actually "win" a green card from a lottery, the US government holds one every year. And it's about to start for this year.
/dev/null. Since, after all, how do you want to check whether those ripoffs actually enter you?
'though, entering it is free, no charges attached, and nobody can increase your chances by even a hair. Actually, my guess would be that your chances are better if you fill out the form yourself, that way you can be sure to actually participate and not end up in
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
I kinda like the banner-sized black space at the top of slashdot. I'd be rather irritated if they put banners there.
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?