Slashdot Mirror
How Web Advertising May Go
Anti-Globalism sends us to Ars Technica for Jon Stokes's musing on the falling value of Web advertising. Stokes put forward the outlying possibility — not a prediction — that ad rates could fall by 40% before turning up again, if they ever do. "A web page, in contrast, is typically festooned with hyperlinked visual objects that fall all over themselves in competing to take you elsewhere immediately once you're done consuming whatever it is that you came to that page for. So the page itself is just one very small slice of an unbounded media experience in which a nearly infinite number of media objects are scrambling for a vanishingly small sliver of your attention. ... We've had a few hundred years to learn to monetize print, over 75 years to monetize TV, and, most importantly, millennia to build business models based on scarcity. In contrast, our collective effort to monetize post-scarcity digital media have only just begun."
Well, I must say that I own a few sites and I'm glad that most of my target audience is oblivious to ad blockers. If not I would have to resort to more sneaky ways of inserting ads into content.
Most sites just cannot survive on donations, subscriptions and merchandising. I don't know if you realize, but the disappearance of advertising would bring the internet down probably to the level it was in the mid nineties. That would kill an entire industry.
I, like probably many site owners, would go to great length to make sure that our businesses remain profitable. If ad blocking becomes a problem for my audience, I would go so far to find ways to forbid the access to my sites to people with adblock&co. It's my content and you will see it my way or not at all.