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Ars Technica Inveighs Against Ad Blocking
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica recently conducted a 12-hour experiment in which story content was hidden from users of popular ad blocking tools. Explaining the experiment, Ken Fisher appealed to Ars's readership: 'My argument is simple: blocking ads can be devastating to the sites you love. I am not making an argument that blocking ads is a form of stealing, or is immoral, or unethical, or makes someone the son of the devil. It can result in people losing their jobs, it can result in less content on any given site, and it definitely can affect the quality of content. It can also put sites into a real advertising death spin. As ad revenues go down, many sites are lured into running advertising of a truly questionable nature. We've all seen it happen. I am very proud of the fact that we routinely talk to you guys in our feedback forum about the quality of our ads. I have proven over 12 years that we will fight on the behalf of readers whenever we can. Does that mean that there are the occasional intrusive ads, expanding this way and that? Yes, sometimes we have to accept those ads. But any of you reading this site for any significant period of time know that these are few and far between. We turn down offers every month for advertising like that out of respect for you guys. We simply ask that you return the favor and not block ads.'"
From the article:
"There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won't hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis."
Hey skxawng! Have you even read ars? Hardly any of the tripe you wrote here applies to that site. I just whitelisted them to see and no pop-ups, no-crazy flashing and all i can see are 2 ads on the entire page. One of which is an ars internal ad on the side about an article. The other is a banner at the very top of the page. I plan to leave them permanently in my whitelist. If they screw up with crappy flash of popups then I will remove them from my whitelist.
Exactly!
Take this an anecdote or whatever, just for the kicks I whitelisted Ars Technica.
For about 100 or so page loads:
- The majority of the ads are for GQ magazine. I didn't even know what the fuck that was before clicking on the link. And no Ars, I don't give a shit what the fuck Kobe Bryant is wearing neither do I care how Pierce Brosnan is having more fun that me. Also, why am I bombarded with GQ ads in the hardware section of the site?
- I had 3 annoying Gilette ads about their Fusion razor. Full blown flash with sound. How is this relevant to a tech/geek site? Ars, I really don't care what razor a douchebag steroid abusing baseball player uses. No really, I don't.
- I get a metric fuckton of ads for Wired magazine, already on their RSS feed, more irrelevant ads.
- I got about 10 or so Microsoft ads about some 'Business Synergy Client Focused' gobbledygook. What the shit? Oh and it's animated flash bogging down my machine.
- I got about 5 or so ads that didn't load completely, I can't even make out what the fuck they are. Trying to connect to some backwater adserver, great way to make sure the page will take years to load.
Why can't I get ads I would be even remotely interested in? Gadgets deals, hardware deals, game deals, interesting bands, interesting books ... you know ... geek stuff? I don't care about fucking GQ, I am not "GQ", never will be.
Sorry Ars, back to the block list.