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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.'"
Somehow Internet has made people to forget that creating quality content costs money. Often a lot of money. Often with these kind of things I'm really surprised at how dumb nerdy people can be too. You know, us who should know better and not be those stupid sheeps who are happy have a "mindless" job and then watch tv for rest of the evening and still enjoy it, even if theres no mentally requiring tasks involved.
But all the while a lot of people, mostly us geeks, cannot grasp that immaterial products and content also costs to create and takes just the same manhours. This is usually the same thing on discussions about piracy too - there's always someone pointing out that "duplicating" that content to sell it to you doesn't cost anything. Really? Are we really that dumb? That may not cost much, but it's creating it that does and those costs are got back from selling it to people. A lot of times a lot later, with some forms of entertainment even years later.
The only reason, I have ad block is because of facebook. While personally I don't like facebook, I have lots of friends on it so I do use it. The problem with facebook is it allows ads that look exactly like facebook apps. Sometimes is really hard to tell the ad from the app. So I installed Ad block plus to remove those annoying ads. If facebook would smarten up and start blocking those ads, I would be willing to remove the ad blocker.
We have been through all this stuff over and over again. People wouldn't have started blocking ads in the first place if they were reasonable ads. These are the reasons I use an ad-blocker:
* Animation- movement of any type
* Sound
* Popups
* Flyouts
* More ad space than content space
* Slow loading third-party sites
I am so anti-animation (I can't STAND movement on the screen while I am trying to read) that I have to block even non-Ad content (using "Flash Killer" and/or a manual Adblock addition for those sections with movement). Sometimes I even have to resort to killing Javascript ("JS Switch"). I don't want to deny sites revenue, but without being able to block the above types of Ad's, I wouldn't visit (or stay on) a site, anyway- so there is little difference.
Sorry Ars Technica... you can CLAIM your ads are non-intrusive and "quality", but I just visited your site with adblocking off and was immediately met with one highly annoying animated banner and a second, lower-animated, section. At least you only had two.
I am tired of companies trying to turn the Internet into Television.
Ads are invasive, intrusive, annoying, and I don't want to see them. ever. There are laws against sending advertisements over the fax and cold-calling cell phones. The logic is that the recipient must pay for the unsolicited advertisement (in fax paper, toner, or cell phone minutes).
Internet ads are no different. I pay for bandwidth and connection time, so your ad directly costs me money, and it should be illegal for that reason. It costs me time too, making your page slower and more annoying. I don't want to have to hunt for the content among all the cleverly disguised ads. I don't want to have to examine the links to figure out which ones are ads and which ones are legitimate.
I will continue blocking ads until the end of time. If you can't figure out how to make money without annoying people, that's your problem. Get creative folks, and stop whining about how you wish people would just be more receptive to being annoyed.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
If sometimes you 'have to accept those ads' then I have to block your ads totally. Maybe you should rethink that strategy, Ars?
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
You won't be indexed by search engines, so you lose more than if you don't block it. Furthermore I stay clear of any website forcing me to add exceptions to NoScript that would allow third party advertisers to run any kind of code on my browser.
Tell that to the girl who got that stupid fake virus scanner that I cleaned off her computer friday. Came from a served ad.
Ads are fine with me as long as they aren't screenfilling/blocking content (like some flash ads that fill your entire screen with some shitty animation).
I have adblock enabled by default but add sites I visit regularly (like this one) in the allowed list so they can display ads.
They're missing the point. Most of the ads only get them money if people click on them. From my experience people who run adblock software are also people who refuse to click on ads in general. So instead of calling people to be annoyed by ads they should call people to turn off their adblock for a second, click on an ad and turn it back on. But well, that's not gonna make the advertisers happy. The authors of Adblock Plus came up with a better proposal http://adblockplus.org/blog/an-approach-to-fair-ad-blocking - I wonder if Ars Technica has looked into that.
The Next Ad you Click on may be a Virus:
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/06/15/2056219
Also, if a websurfer can go faster online by blocking out banner ads (as well as safer, per the article above), then they have that option via browser addons like Adblock (or protection vs. their more than potentially infected scripting via NoScript), or by mechanisms like PAC files or specialized CSS files, or a custom HOSTS file.
There's that above, which means quite possibly spending monies on removing said infestation (which is not cheap, and not every "Joe Sixpack" knows how it is done, or wants to for that matter), and the fact that people pay for their own linetime.
So it's ok for Ken Fisher of arstechnica to ask those same people to not only pay for their linetime, and for possible removal of viruses/spywares/rootkits/trojans/malwares in general that they may have caught from malicious adbanners too, but also to pay for Ken Fisher's life on top of that all as well? A life and lifestyle made off of millions made from ad banner revenues no doubt, and yet not off of his own efforts writing up every article his site has done, as well as the coding work put into his site (which I doubt he did every line of himself as well).
So, who are the REAL freeloaders here? The end users, or those using the end users to make their living from those passing by their sites and being forced to look at flashing ads (which are attacks on the psyche no questions asked and not much better than subliminal ads on T.V., since both basically snag a user's subconscious attention via a "look at me and let me sell you something you may not even need"!)
So, once more: Who is/are the REAL freeloaders here??
The end users, or those using them (website owners) to make their living from those passing by their sites and being forced to look at flashing ads (which are attacks on the psyche no questions asked, basically yelling at them "look at me and let me sell you something you may not even need"? There's the real question to ask here!)??
This is a "double-edged sword", and that is all there is to it, period.
Above all - I wonder how much Ken Fisher pays his article writers in terms of the percentage of profits he makes off of their efforts?? How come I have this feeling it is only tiny crumbs from the massive profits he's earned over time from ad banner monies given he by his sponsors???
I hope the article writer reads this.
Or changing the channel when a commercial comes on?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't internet ads generate their revenue through the amount of clicks they incur? I know Google's ads do this.
By using adblock, what I'm saying is: I'm never going to be clicking on any of the ads on your website.
If I didn't use it, I still wouldn't be clicking on any ads on your website and they will also annoy me.
It's most likely that the people using ad blocking don't care about the ads you display and won't be clicking on them anyway.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
Now, you run a website. You can't maintain a viable business model. You lose money. Your readers are leaving. Now choose one:
It seems that Ars chose the worst, i.e. no. 2.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
I posted this there, and I'll post it here, too.
I consider it irresponsible not to browse the web with a really good ad/Flash/javascript blocker. Not just because of the annoyance factor, but because it is a significant vector of malicious code attacks. This isn't just hypothetical; in the recent past, sites such as Wikia and a gaming site I visit injected malicious code and infected users' machines. The site hosts were completely unaware of it; the code was being injected through a third-party ad provider. Fortunately, I found out about this through someone else when they brought it to my attention, because the code never made it to my browser.
Ars raises a good point, but the simple truth is that given the choice between having less content available or putting my system's security at risk, I'll choose the first option any day. I'm sorry--I really am, because I know that it is devastating to sites such as theirs, and I'd gladly whitelist their site but for the risk. I don't blame reputable sites like Ars, I blame a decade and a half of abuse by ad companies. But such is the state of affairs.
Plus, please keep in mind that a lot of sites I visit are new to me, and they're sites that I don't know whether or not they're reputable. Many of them engage in what I consider an "ad assault" on me, barraging me with all sorts of annoyances for content that is of little to no value. When I'm just puttering around the Internet without visiting one of my usual haunts, most of the content means so little to me that until I have a chance to evaluate whether or not it's worth it and whether or not they advertise in some sane, responsible manner, I feel fully justified in not letting them force feed such annoyances to me.
For what it's worth, he is right, I'm glad they brought the issue up in a tactful manner, and I'm going to subscribe to Ars since I do indeed find its content of high value. When sites I value provide such an alternate business model for paying for their existence, I do try to do my part to support them.
If I open Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, with a few tabs active in each on popular sites, the entirety of both cores of my Intel E7500 CPU will be consumed by Flash advertisements.
I'm on a Linux machine with a lot of memory, which makes for the worst case scenario: First, Flash is horrible on Linux. Second, I use virtual desktops and leave browsers open for days at a time. Memory is not a problem.
Flash ads tend to be poorly written by a creative designer who could give a rat's rear end about your system resources.
The ads interfere with my ability to work, which costs me money. They also cause my computer to consume significantly more power. So in effect, your Flash ads are even bad for the environment.
They're also of course quite annoying, and if given only the options of browsing the internet with Flash ads or not browsing the internet at all, I'll choose the latter.
How about you try this experiment: Turn off Flash ads. Post a banner at the top of your site that says, "Hey, we've turned off Flash ads. Please exclude this site from your ad blocker so we can make money."
I've never really bothered to block web content until recently. But I've now started using rekonq's Click-To-Flash mode having seen (far too many times) pointless Flash applets consuming 100% CPU when I just leave them. I'm currently using nspluginwrapper so at least I can hunt down the misbehaving Flash and kill it directly (a la Google Chrome), which is better than the old days where I had to guess which Firefox tab might contain an applet that's hammering performance. Unfortunately this means I don't see all the ads - I've never been that bothered by ads appearing, just one of those things that you get because people need to pay the bills. Occasionally ads are even amusing (e.g. the Plants vs Zombies parodies of the maddening Evony psuedo-porn adverts).
I don't block adverts specifically, though. Non-Flash ads are free to take up screen space and my attention and very rarely they're even interesting. Google's text-based ads are also fine, although some sites make it difficult to distinguish those from the actual articles. But these days it's a pretty hard sell to ask people to run resource-hungry software just to get adverts. Maybe Flash behaves better on other platforms - but OTOH, advertisers are going to lose revenue on iPad and iPhone customers if they don't move away from Flash at some point. For lots of these adverts I'd be tempted to say that an HTML5 video might even be more appropriate (!).
Linux Weekly News (http://lwn.net/) which is by far my favourite "serious" geek news site (mainly because of their kernel page) has a nice model involving some adverts + subscription. They do have some adverts. They also delay some of their best content by a week if you're not a paying subscriber. Subscribers can categorise themselves according to an "honour system" to choose how much they pay if they want to subscribe. Apparently it works OK for them. I suspect this only really works for them because they produce extremely high-quality, specialist articles - you plain can't get some of this stuff elsewhere, so it's worth supporting them. A general-consumption geek news site is going to find that sort of thing a lot harder.
The problem with this is, the advertisements themselves can not be trusted. Beyond the issue of the sound and animation, advertisements are a malware vector. I'm having a huge problem with 'Antispyware 2010' and its variants. One idiot claims he got his from Microsoft, because it says Microsoft on it. If they were less hazardous, I'd block them less. I turned off blocking for Project Wonderful and for Google's text ads, after all.
*My* RAM. *My* bandwidth.
I pay for it all, and I don't really care if your site folds (this includes you slashdot), you're just a momentary diversion, don't flatter yourself otherwise. There will be another along in 10 minutes.
So, i'm going to continue to block images, particularly moving ones. Javascript, flash, and pretty much anything else they come up with. I used to leave google ads alone, they were relevant, textual and just sat there inviting a click, but they blew it as well.
Deleted
On a practical note, I make a point of never clicking on adverts. The only way I interact with an advert is to make a little mental note to reduce my opinion of the advertiser and to make it less likely for me to recommend them. It is more helpful for you if I block your adverts entirely.
On an Internet's note, if you don't want something rendered as I please, don't send it via unauthenticated HTTP. As a reasonably technically competent magazine, you should know better.
On a personal note, I owe you nothing. If you think your content is worth charging for, charge for it. If you provide your content, I will take it, just as I am happy with people taking the fruits of my labour as published on the Internet (and sharing it). Change your business model and try voluntary donations or subscriptions if you want, but don't ask me to be dishonest with your advertisers.
On a general note, paid advertising is not a good way of raising awareness, and I will take no part in the cycle -- enough essays have been written about this already.
Here we have yet another politician trying to manipulate us into seeing things his way with a fallacious argument. Why does anyone decide to use ad-blocking software in the first place? Do people set out with the express goal that "Heh, I'm gonna teach these fuckers a lesson"? I certainly didn't. Nope... I employed ad-blocking techniques because the ads became a truly hard-sell nightmare. Does anyone recall the meatspace jokes about car salesmen and "hard sell" tactics? That's what we're talking about here: digital ads that take a hard-sell approach.
NOBODY likes the hard-sell tactics. That's why I, and most other people, employ RECIPROCAL tactics to block ads, because far too many are insanely hard-sell. Has it been simple greed and lack of self-restraint, no scruples, or did their business model just suck vacuum from the start? Is either cause my fault, my problem? Honestly... and they blame *us* for starting the whole contest? Ya got it ass backwards there, chum. Ad-blocking is here to stay BECAUSE your foolish greed arrived first.
Honestly, it's already just too damned late; this ship had already sailed. Advertisers proved themselves to be consistently untrustworthy and self-centered, and we responded in kind. How do they intend to win back our trust? Oh, that's right: by blaming the bad behavior on *us* and claiming they always had our best interests at heart.
Bullshit.
Ya know what? I do believe I could survive well enough without their "content" if it just dried up and blew away. So find yourselves a revenue model, guys, one that actually works and that we can actually afford, or just go away. Ad-blocking is here to stay.
"If you're not willing to unblock our ads, we're fairly happy for you to not read the content we work very hard on, or to just stop visiting the site altogether." (in comment thread here)
Ok, your terms are acceptable. See ya.
I block all scripts, flash, ads, by default. Once the website is trusted I whitelist it. It is a huge pain for me to temporarily allow a site I setup macros to allow certain content. On TV FCC regulates the content. On the Web I regulate the content. I'm sorry if I get to use your site without contributing to your income.
Not blocking ads can be devastating to users' computers.
Blocking ads is more than just a means to cut down on the annoying clutter on the screen. It is a security measure. And the fact is, "respect" is and should be a two-way street. Advertisers do not respect the audience. They will place as many ads "...as the market can bear" or will tolerate. They want attention and will use seizure-inducing colors and flashing to get it. Further, hidden among the many redirects, there are scripts and other exploits designed to turn a user's computer into a bot or worse.
If advertisers used only the most respectful methods, the need for ad blockers would not exist and neither would the ad blockers themselves.
As things stand, even on the most legitimate of sites, users are at risk due to the methods advertisers use when enlisting and deploying advertising campaigns.
Lower my defenses so you can earn money from my eyes? Burn in hell!
1. Pay respect to your audience
2. Use methods that do not require "web client cooperation" and trust the sites hosting your ads. (Use scripts to inject text based ads into the articles originating from the site being read, not from external sites! There is a problem of trust that everyone needs to overcome.)
I don't leave my windows and doors open to allow advertisers to walk into my home because OTHER people will enter as well.
This sort of argument, as it pertains to piracy, is pretty darned common over at TechDirt, which I also read. I have a lot of sympathy for the creators of "boring" content, like news sites. At least a musician can do live performances and sell merchandise; an author can do lectures and book signings. People used to pay for content so we blame the content creators for having a bad business model and challenge them to come up with something that we'll buy. But we still want the content and we want the money-making good/service to be related to the content too. What is a news site supposed to do? How many people are going to buy an Ars Technica t-shirt? So they make money by selling ads to third parties but people find ways to avoid looking at the ads. Some people would argue that this is Ars Technica's problem and that if they can't find a service that people will buy, they "deserve" to go out of business. How can people have this kind of attitude and then wonder why the content that remains is spineless and pandering? It's because we've driven the real content creators away and all that's left are marketers with delusions of creativity.
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
It's fair for Ars to block content to those who block ads from their site, if that's what they wish: it's Ars content. It's also fair for those who use ad blockers to be annoyed at Ars for it: nobody likes having something nice taken away from them, and Ars is taking away ad-free access to the content. Ars needs to be careful about the trade-off: is the increased ad revenue (if any) worth the bad publicity?
Look, if you're running a web site that makes its money from ads, you have to understand the problems with your own business model. You have to understand that people can and will block ads, and factor that in as a risk to your business. If ad revenues are dropping and you have to lay off staff then let me get out my little violin because that happens for a multitude of reasons across the entire business world. Simply find a way to make it work -- find a different way to make money, cut costs, make it difficult to block your ads, etc. The customer/reader is not beholden in any way to keep you in business by behaving the way that you expect them to. If your web site fails, it's because you're a poor business person and not because of the world around you.
With ads - without ads - what a waste of argument when geeks could instead debate an interesting arms race.
The ad-blocking technologies work because the ads themselves are easily identified by the source web site as different from the main web page. A small change in architecture would allow ads to be funneled through the main presenting web page server and integrated with the main web site in real-time.
Current versions of Ad-block plus and No-script would then be rendered useless for the purpose of ad-blocking.
What the opposing side would then need to do is develop databases of ads, analyze screens and then repaint screens with blank space where the ads where.
No wait! The ad presenters would then need to problematically vary every ad as appearing to be unique.
No wait! The blockers could then use Bayesian logic to detect areas of presentation close enough to ads to be suppresses anyway.
Whole new levels point-counter-point spy-vs.-spy program evolution!
Whole new discussions, trolls, and flame-wars about the nuances of why one approach is SO MUCH BETTER at blocking (or overcoming blocking).
That would be the slash.dot, SourceForge, and Mozilla Add-on communities I have come to know and love.
Bwahahahahahahaahahh..........
Live Long and Prosper - Thanks Leonard. You are missed.
One serious problem with subscriptions and paywalls is that they effectively prevent linking content -- the most important feature of the web.
Ironically Slashdot demonstrated this for me when I tried to pull up their front page before coming into this story. I'm on a pretty snappy connection, and Slashdot is no slouch, but because my browser was waiting on ad.doubleclick.com I was stuck looking at the top banner and that was pretty much it.
If you have js code that loads ads it *must* come at the end of the page. I try to be good about keeping adblock off, but incidents of these things lead me to blocking a domain's ads.
Here's the main problem I have with enabling ads..
Load NoScript in your browser.. Then load some random sites. Some of them are advertiser sites that are being blocked. Some of these advertiser sites (maybe disguised as a social networking site) can then set/read cookies from your browser. In their databases they can aggregate your browsing patterns.
Here's where it's a problem...
On one social networking site that I use I have many of my co-workers and business associates. In the past I've already had ads start showing up on non-related sites after browsing new products. For example, I don't have a pet but someone asked me to research some flea medication. Within moments after researching on one site, I started noticing flea powders being advertised on another site. Coincidence? What would you think?
I don't want my personal life to start spilling into my public/work life. The problem with these ad sites is that I do not know what information they are storing about me. I don't know if their revenues one day start to decline so they start opening up my records to seedy advertisers. What if Facebook modifies their policy or some seedy advertiser exploits a bug in the Facebook API and starts posting on my home page? What if my co-workers start seeing "Holley 4-Barrel Carbs and the Men Who Love Them" on my page and get the wrong impression? What if LinuxJournal posts "Finger, mount, fsck and sleep" on my wall (and say I work at Microsoft)?
/. has ads for passerbys and noobs. To support the community they let good users have a free pass, this doesn't cost them much and improves the site. Lastly they allow people to donate/sign up with money.
They plan for and only expect a small chunk of people to sign up, but each signed up person pays for 1000 not signed up people. And the other bit of advertising is additional revenue without annoying anyone you really want on the site. Perfect! All sites should be run this way.
That or have an additional source of revenue and leave the website as a loss in efforts to increase $ to the other products. Put website into 'advertising' as an expense rather than kidding yourself and thinking it is a revenue stream.
We all know where this is headed.
...
In the future you will be offered cable-esque packages.
$29.95/mo for 100 of your favorite sites ad free. wsj, Nickjr,
$9.95/mo for 10 of your favorite sites ad free.
Legal speed
Perhaps the site would get paid, but that's really not important in the long run. The actual profit is only made when a customer buys something from the advertiser. Making uninterested people listen to a sales pitch is a waste of time. Generating ad views that have no chance of generating a sale is doing a disservice to both the advertiser and the viewer.
How would you feel about an ad blocker that loads the ads in the background without showing them to the reader? That's fine, because Ars Technica gets paid?
In particular, NoScript seems to prevent 100% of Ars's ads. I don't have AdBlock installed, but I have NoScript, and I see no ads on that page.
If they are saying they demand that I run all the scripts on their site if I'm going to look at the content, well sorry, no way.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
its like tv ads. remember how the ad agencies in europe started to make funny/interesting ads so that viewers would at least watch them once, and tell them to other people ? its supposed to be like that. when an ad is funny, even if you havent seen it, you HEAR it from someone else. eventually you end up checking out the ads if the thing will come up or not, if you cant find it directly online. and then you watch it and laugh. you laugh, and the ad agency delivers their message. give and take, everyone is happy.
the situation of online advertising is more like american advertising of old times - obnoxious, intrusive, repetitive, stupid (or at least takes viewers as stupid) and makeshift. noone wants that.
Read radical news here
Ars Technica, who is that? Oh yes, that's one of those annoying sites I don't read anymore, because they insist upon breaking every story into a dozen pages so they can push more ads.
Hey Ars,
here's some
advice:
(buy Brawndo capacitors - they got electrolytics, its what current craves!)
(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Next)
Rather than
making me
search for
a Print link
(Buy BigJuggs Disks - you KNOW what you want to store!)
(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Next)
So that I
can read
your site
quickly
(Play NoLife for free for the next three minutes- only $123.99!)
(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Next)
and actually
use ALL of
my screen,
instead of
just the
middle
(Host your site on NotWorking Pollution!)
(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Next)
why don't
you put it
on one page
(Microsoft, we aren't sociopathic monopolists, we just act like one)
(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Next)
And see
if that
works.
(visit our sister site ICanHasContent!)
(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Next)
(post us to Wastebook!)
(Post us to Shovel!)
(Post us to DidntReadIt!)
(Post us to NoLife!)
(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Next)
www.eFax.com are spammers
Aw, no more ars technica? Not missed anyways.
Aw, no more gmail? Tough shit - more than 95% of all the bogus registrations I see are from spammers using gmail.
Aw, no more search? Aw - guess we'll have to depend on good old word-of-mouth, and specialized sites that also cache searchable content from elsewhere. And distributed search.
Aw, no more podcasts and webinars? Nobody watches them anyways.
It's going to happen anyway - ad-blocking/security agents with enough intelligence to remove all ads. By 2020 the big Internet advertisers are all dead and gone, because change is chaotic, not gradual. Find another model, or FOAD.
They could more closely emulate the ads of printed media, which drew only rare complaints from readers... or they could emulate the ads of TV, which cause a lot of people to recoil.
What we got on the web are TV-like ads without sound but which:
still flicker, shake and gyrate;
actively obstruct the UI;
imitate system warnings to mislead;
peg the CPU to near 100% on slower systems;
act as a programmable vector for malware and surveillance.
Yikes.
In order to keep infection rates of my naive Windows customers down, I have to not only educate them about trojans and phishing (teaching them to hover over links before clicking works wonders)... I also have to install Adblock as an absolute necessity. Otherwise they WILL get infected in short order, often in an attempt to rid themselves of an "infection" that a popup ad "found".
What's more, this is not television. People come to the Internet to find what they want, not to have "Hey we know what you want!!" pushed in their faces twice as often as with ye olde media.
I now believe that ads should be limited to GIFs and JPEGs on the website's main page. The advertisers crossed over into unethical territory before ad-blocking users, about the same time that actual content on websites became heavily dependent on Javascript. That leaves me with the following questions: What are journalists and advertisers doing about this problem? Do advertisers even care that their delivery infrastructure is poisonous?
Adblock might compromise by letting GIF and JPEG through as a default. But these questions still need to be dealt with.
I've got enough monthly payments to deal with between car payments, car insurance, rent, phone bill, internet, and so forth. I don't want to and am not going to add a bunch of $.99 micropayments on top of everything else.
$.05 an article? Micropayment? How many articles have you read on the internet today? How many this month? Let's see... in the past hour or so I read... $.05 1-Article MMO-Champion.com $.10 2-Articles WoW.com $.10 2-Articles Slashdot.org $.10 2-Articles ArsTechnica.com $.10 2-Articles Cracked.com $.05 1-Article NYTimes.com $.05 1-Article NewsoftheWeird.com
Ok... that works out to $.55 in an hour. Let's say 3 hours on the internet per day or 21 hours per week... $11.55 a week multiplied by 4 to get per month... $46.20... multiplied by 12 for the yearly cost... $554.40. $554.40 a year on micropayments!!!
So... tell me again... are you willing to make micropayments for every article you read on the internet?
Also, if many websites go to a micropayment model users will get sick of having to enter their credit card or paypal account every time they want to read something. Someone like Rupert Murdoch will come along and offer a whole bunch of this content for one payment instead of a ton of little payments.
It'll be a reintroduction to an AOL type experience where everything the average user would look at would be through the filter of one giant corporation.
Yep... Micropayments is exactly where the big corporations would like us to go.
Web hosting that doesn't suck!Dreamhost
1. Do not allow ads that popup, cover, dance, wiggle, make noise, or do anything other than sit there, NOT flash or any other plugin techonology.
2. Do not let the ads overwhelm your design, either by placement or quantity.
and the biggie...
3. Never EVER let your business model depend on ad views, click-throughs, or anything else the ad buyers foist on you to "prove" their ad is seen. It's BS anyway. Magazines, TV, newspapers (remember them?), all survived just fine without advertisers ever having proof if anyone gave them business because of the ads. Coupons came along for reason, you know.
Corollary to 3: Don't let ad revenue be your sole source of income. Consider a mix of strategies, including ads, but also including premium content and features for subscribers; peripheral merchandising (think hats and t-shirts); and various collateral deals.
Ok, here's a really radical idea: Maybe the problem isn't the ads, but that the ads are provided by third party hosting sites that are out of the control of the web site *using* those ads. If the web site hosted the ad file, then *they* would be held responsible for the singing, dancing gophers trying to sell you the latest in prophylactics, and ad-blockers would be less effective.
But in general, the reason ad blocking exists, and will continue to exist is:
1) animation (any kind)
2) sound and/or music
3) popups, pupunders, and any other sort of ad that *demands* your immediate attention like a little kid jumping up and down, waving his hands because he has to go to the bathroom.
Advertisers need to understand: we *tolerate* you. But make yourself too annoying, and we *will* cut you off at the knees. This is true of Television (Tivo), Radio (iPod), Newspapers (yeah, just flip the page here), and now the Internet. Push us too far, and someone *will* develop ad blocking software that happily tells you we are viewing your ad, while at the same time dropping the whole thing in the trash. Please don't turn this into a war. It's one you can't win.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
I searched the comments here and noted that no-one has mentioned that Ars are owned by Condé Nast, a company with an estimated $4-5Billion+ annual revenue. They also own Wired and Reddit, let alone Vogue, GQ and numerous other publications.
Why do I mention this? Context. If Ars was still an independent operator then I'd have more sympathy for their argument, and yes they still have numbers to maintain... but have you considered their sister magazines, take Vogue/GQ for example and think of page content vs pages of advertising. I watched "The September Issue" a few weeks ago and the thing that stuck in my mind was that that issue of Vogue had about 800 pages and only over a 100 pages were actual content, the rest were adverts. Fucking nuts! So yes, the argument of advertising driven content isn't going away and we'll see what happens should Mr Murdoch (who seems to want to own every content producer on the planet) try his pay-wall experiment.
As for ad-blocking... I continue using it and am glad since I've seen the latest shit that people have to deal with, auto-loading videos, sound, fly-outs you can't shut, flash ads that grind your page to a halt, as well as the malware that floats around and even hits high profile sites... I want control of what opens up in my browser and the only ads I'd ever consider are Google textual ads... why? cos they don't piss me off. Advertising should be an enticement of a good deal, done in a thoughtful and pleasant manner.. Unfortunately the Advertising 'industry' (I also include SEO bastards too here) battles everyone to promise customers the Earth while pissing off the very people they're meant to attract, they go through periods of continual fads in order to push shit and pretend to everyone they are 'unique' in their services, yet do the same as everyone else. The arguments from most advertisers that people who use ad-blocking software need burning at the stake tells me a lot, in that they just don't 'get-it', a good advertiser/marketer will have spent time arguing both camps and understand the issues at hand (as well as the people they're meant to be advertising to) whereas the rest fail at being the clever people they advertise themselves to be.
My suggestion to Ars, if it is that much of an issue then block your content from being shown 'full-stop' to anyone using ad-blocking software as you did in your experiment... then you only have to serve a minimal bandwidth using text page explaining why, fucking deal with it instead of whining like everyone else (i.e. News Corp, et al). The advertising industry won't die, but it will contract, change and evolve. But as a web browser I will not be dictated to that I have to have certain content forced down my throat, and I will control what I choose to see. There are multiple revenue streams possible, and I view Ars as producing higher quality content than a lot of other sites out there that I would be willing to pay for if I visited it enough (El Reg, BBC News, Slashdot and Fark tend to be my usual reads, and as a TV license holder I already pay for BBC News). Going back to context again, it would also be handy if Ars was to tell us their average percentage of userbase are that employ ad-blocking, which as a tech site I'd guess would be higher than a regular new site.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
See, here's the thing: I don't care.
Clearly you have the technology to withhold content from users running adblockers, so why don't you just do that?
Why don't we make a deal? I don't care how you run your site if you don't care how I run my browser. If that means excluding me from your content if I refuse to look at ads or run flash or scripts, then so be it. If its compelling enough content to make me turn off my ad blocker, than I will. If you're worried about losing impressions due to people not knowing why your site isn't rendering, include a message saying as much in the ad-block version.
Its time to nut up or shut up. Bitching about it in this article is a lame attempt at emotional extortion.
There was a TV programme in the UK recently where some US 'expert' bemoaned how the internet is constantly selling us stuff and invading our privacy.
I don't know if this is some difference in language between the USA and the UK, but advertising is not selling! Advertising is trying to start the process of me thinking about buying something.
Bad, invasive and annoying browser advertising is actually a very useful guide about what not to buy.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
I think people are intentionally missing the point.
Someone makes a website.
The time it took to make the site costs them money either directly or indirectly (they made it, or they paid someone to make it).
Someone is paying to keep the web server online in bandwidth, hardware, content upkeep or software costs.
The only way most people can make money from a website is to show ads. Ad companies can tell if their ads are displaying and pay less if their ads are blocked. The only way for people using this model to pay for content managers, bandwidth costs, faster servers, etc is through ad revenue. If site owners don't get paid, they can't pay for these things, so one or many of the things running the site don't work as well.
If you can't afford reliable content managers (or you yourself have to work a real job because you don't get paid enough), the content suffers. If you can't afford a lot of bandwidth, the site gets slow from throttling it. If you can't afford up to date anti-virus (or a good ops guy to manage your firewall), your site is easier to hack and take down. If you can't afford a new nic card (or F5 for large sites with server farms), your site goes offline with hardware issues.
If a large business owns a site and it doesn't make money, it simply takes it offline or invests less in the above mentioned maintenance costs until the value of the site is diminished to the point that it's better to read another site - or a magazine for that matter.
The thing the guy is trying to say is that if you like the current state of the site, it takes money to maintain. If it doesn't make enough money, he doesn't have to work for free. If you don't care if the site goes down or degrades in some way, go ahead and block the ads. If you take a "I wasn't going to pay for it anyway, but will if it's free and those ads are like a tax on my sanity so I block them" stance, what he's saying is that you're reducing his ability to make money from his site and by extension, lowering the overall experience for everyone.
I worked for a news site that made money with a per-view ad model and can tell you that it takes several million dollars a month to maintain a world class news site. The AP must be paid for content. Editors to moderate the AP must be paid. Production Operations guys, Test Operations guys, Developers, Release Engineers, Project Managers, Ad Operations, Managers for PM/Dev/Editorial/Test, Marketing, Sales...all have to be paid.
It's always a delicate balancing act with your corporate overlords who want to make a lot of money (to pay the bills, and appease THEIR corporate overlords) - while trying not to alienate your user. Big invasive ads make more money per impression than little ones that few people see. That you don't see giant ads on a given site all the time is a testament to their restraint or ability to ward off the bottom-lining execs.
I love free sites like Slashdot, but they're probably has high quality as they are because the majority of people let ads display. Sure, Slashdot would probably still be on the web if nobody viewed the ads, but it's unlikely to have a lot of the features that ad revenue paid to have developed.
I'd be interested to hear what Slashdot would be like if they made no ad revenue from CmdrTaco. Would they have been bought up by their corporate overlords? What would that have meant if they hadn't?
Adblock Plus on Firefox blocks everything, but if you use Chrome it still loads the ad, but your browser hides it.