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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."
What I fear is that due to this, websites will end up having to host more intrusive ads (interstitials, the whole website being a Flash object that demands not just Flash enabled but the saving of shared objects) for the same money, as well as more code to try to block ad blocking programs (which makes it worse long term as people go elsewhere for similar content.)
Even now, a good number of Web forums will insta-ban someone just on the mention of Adblock and NoScript because the sites are so desparate for revenue.
Long term, I wonder if the solution is a page click clearinghouse, where people pay a central subscription center (in return for no ads and other membership benefits to all subscriber websites) which pays websites by how many pages that user browses from their account. Essentially, similar to how Slashdot does its subscriptions, except with member sites getting paid per view.
I tried to let the model work, but after they finally started using Flash tricks to display pop-ups, I finally used the "nuclear option". Whats that? The hosts file. I call it the nuclear option because it takes out unobtrusive ads along with the nasty ones. I really didn't want to do it, but the web advertising industry left me no choice.
If major web sites ever decide to adopt a code of ethics, whereby additional window spawning, interstitials, and other obtrusive ads are barred, I'll stop using hosts.
Really, it worked fine for dead tree print guys, there's no reason it can't work for you. I don't even mind cookies. It was actually kind of cool when Yahoo started showing me ads for IC chips and network cards. Maybe they're still trying to do that, but I'll never know; because some worthless X-10 popup weenie is being blocked by my hosts file.
Get it? Is ANYBODY listening?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Stuff like this encourages people to install ad blockers. Back when ads were un-intrusive.. most people didn't bother with ad blockers. Now though.. browsing the web without some kind of blocker is an experience in pain... and unfortunately the nice ads that don't annoy users get blocked along with everything else.
What we really need are "annoying ad blockers". That would gives sites an incentive to use less obtrusive adds, which would be less likely to be blocked.
The effects of ad blockers that block everything is to encourage advertorials and other sneaky ways to get past them, most of which are worse than the original ads.
I run a few websites with services for certain groups of people. I support these websites with ads.
You see, as a webmaster, I basically have two options. After I developed the site for free in my spare time (it was fun!), I have to keep it running. This includes writing content, updating stuff, managing the user database (one of the sites has over 200.000 users). Which I also do in my spare time because it's still fun and doesn't cost me money.
That's not everything, though. At the end of every month, my hoster sends me a bill for each of my websites. Those bills are between 100$ and 250$ for each of those sites.
Frankly, while spending my spare time building websites is enjoyable, spending 500$-1000$ a month (!) to keep them running, is not.
I rely on people to click my ads. I place my ads carefully so they don't interrupt users reading, I blacklist bad ads and I only run AdSense ads. Currently, the revenue is about 20% more than what I have to pay for the servers. However, if 50% of my users would block ads or simply not click on them, I would have to shut down my websites.
Bottom line: Ads are a great way to fund websites run by small businesses and one-man-shows. If you think those websites are unnecessary and the internet would be better off without them and only big businesses should have the right to have a website, by all means block the ads!
Clarification: I do use Firefox with Adblock but I allow AdSense ads and ads from a few other publishers I trust enough not to show some ugly flash overlays/popunders/music playing ads etc. I also whitelist all websites I visit regularly where the ads don't bother me.
Anyone care to guess why Google's CHROME has no ability to use plugins/add-ons?
(And, I'd actually use Chrome if I could BLOCK THE DAMN ADS!!! Who cares if Chrome renders this well and/or is faster... CAN IT BLOCK ADS??, No?... OK! Fine... So, where's my FF icon? )
Therefore I use FireFox 3.x with NoScript, AdBlock Pro, and Flashblock installed...
(Sure, I find myself whitelisting certain sites often... but that is the way it should be!)
Try reading certain sites with IE7 at netbook resolutions and you will love FF with the ad killing plugins/add-ons....
Stop being so melodramatic please. Your make it sound like that if I don't look at 50 web advertisements in a day your gonna blend a cute little kitten.
I hate to point this out to you, but if you had a website that was supporting five kids and fifty little other kids in Africa and my eyeballs made all the difference each month ... well then fuck it. Seriously. Fuck the whole thing and I don't care. Let them starve. I don't give a fucking shit. If I could insure world peace by having my nuts hit with a ball peen hammer 10 times a day I might consider it, but I won't do the same just to allow some web site owners the ability to keep doing what they are doing. Yes, I do equate web advertisements with getting my balls traumatized on a daily basis.
I am not flaming you either here and this is not a personal attack . Am I little excited about this post? Yeah, a little. But, please seriously step back a moment and try to understand what I am going to say because I am not that different than most people on the Internet. I may be an 11, but most people are >=7 on this.
Please try to understand what I am saying. I HATE ADVERTISEMENTS. PURE BLACK SEETHING HATRED. They just get in the way of me being able to enjoy content and to enrich my life with said content. Think about that. I don't watch movie previews on the DVD or even in the theater. I walk in 8 minutes late. I don't even DVR anymore since the bastards sued the automatic commercial skip out of existence. I torrent all the television shows on TV (in 720p even) and watch them without ad content and I might even stop that since complete twats like the Sci-Fi channel are putting whole "footers" in during the middle of Stargate Atlantis that completely distract from the whole damn show. They are going to go broke anyways since Stargate Atlantis is over and the super genius media executives canceled such shows like FireFly and FarScape. I mean seriously, what's left that is worth sitting through ad banners during the shows and commercials between? But I digress....
I will never ever submit to advertisers. It is fundamentally dishonest as a practice. It insults our collective intelligence and provides absolutely no useful information about a service or a product. It is the equivalent of a woman flashing her titties at a bunch of guys to manipulate their wallets out of their pockets like a master illusionist, except 1/1,000,000 as enjoyable. If one learns about advertising and marketing they quickly find it is all about how to manipulate the consumer. How does that sound like an evolved practice worthy of humanity and its potential?
When I want or need something, I will seek the product out. Review sites, consumer reports, anecdotal information, manufacturer websites, etc. At least then the majority of the information will have 1,000,000 times more truth and reality in it than any single advertisement ever could. Period. Truth and advertisements mix about as well as sodium and water.
Web Based Advertisements are the equivalent of the Internet with a case of raging herpes. You lament that only way in your opinion to keep the Internet alive is to submit and accept that herpes is the way of life. Well not for me my friend. Sorry. I would rather not have the websites and their content. That is the cure and I have partaken of the sweet elixir.
Exactly that. Sell T-Shirts and other parapherna
Advertorial isn't a problem.
People don't want to read advertorial, sites employing advertorial become useless and folks will stop reading them.
And yes, blocking will win the race because all they have to do is download the ads and not display them, then the server really is none the wiser. Unless you get into all sorts of crazy technology like embedding client-side javascript that validates the page layout before loading up the content, or some such thing.
Still, in the end it's the person controlling the browser (end-user) that has the power here. This is a fundamental difference from television, and one I really like.
(alright, I know, I can turn the tv off...)
A very pessimistic conclusion. If you get enough pageviews (and you really have 200k users) there ought to be plenty of companies you can strike a deal with directly ($250 is peanuts for a large site). If you host the ads locally, there is a very small chance those ads will be automatically blocked with adblock plus.
Remember: with adsense you are only getting a small slice of the pie. If you have a large userbase try to scale up using companies that you know your userbase will be interested in. This way you know what kinds of ads you get on your site and both sides get a better deal. Cut out the middleman (even if it is the big G).
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I have to agree on the "bounce over" ads and can I add that we should find the moron who invented flash ads and seriously beat the crap out of them. Seriously they are probably the biggest reason that adblocks exist. It never fails that I will get called out to someone's home or small business and it takes me about 3 seconds of trying to get anything done with IE and those stupid irritating flash ads before I am reaching for my lanyard to get my flash with portable FF3 with Adblock.
And it never fails that when the customers sees what I am doing and notices there are no more stupid dancing ads all over the place I always get the same questions-"What is that? How come you don't see those stupid ads anymore? Really, automatically? How much does it cost? Really? Can you install that while you are here?". So congratulations writers of those damned stupid flash ads! You get more folks off IE and onto FF3 than all the extra features in the world simply to get AWAY from you! Try surfing an average home users favorites without ad blocking and quickly see how freaking thick those stupid flash ads have become.
And if any Mozilla developers are reading this? You should give the guy that wrote the extensions framework a sloppy kiss and a big fat raise. Because everyone I have given FF to it quickly becomes a "must have" simply because of the power of extensions. I know that for me the web without Adblock Plus + Noscript + Forecastfox= a big pile of suck. So the other guys can come up with faster rendering engines and all the other doodads they want, I am NOT giving up my extensions! And thanks to portable FF3 and FEBE I can carry my FF3 with up to date bookmarks wherever I go without having to install anything on the customers PC. Of course thanks to those damned stupid flash ads it doesn't take any selling at all before the customer is asking for his/her own copy installed. And once they switch to a web without flash ads they don't EVER want to go back.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.