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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."
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"?
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.
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...)