Game Site Wonders 'What Next?' When 50% of Users Block Ads

6 writes "Destructoid, one of the few remaining bastions of independent game journalism online, wonders what to do now that nearly 50% of their users run ad-blockers."

Comments

It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Swallow it.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[lesincompetent]

Care to elaborate?

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[bhagwad]

Flawed how? I will gladly see ads in order to get free access to a site.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the websites on Internet are funded using advertisements.

So what? Most Dutch investments in 1636 were in tulips. They didn't have a god-given right to make money, either.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[hairyfeet]

I'm not him but I'll be happy to list why its fucked up..1.- A VERY large portion of the viruses out there end up through infected ads, block ads? Virus infections drop off the map. 2.- Destructoid does NOT sere the ads, like everybody else that pass it off to third parties. See #1 as to why that is a problem, it lets you pass the buck and you end up giving your users infections. 3.- The advertisers have gone from simple txt and jpgs to shitting out ads that take over the sound and maxes out the volume, its like inviting someone into your home and on the second or third visit they scream in your face..would you invite them back? 4.- They have taken ad revenues to the extreme, an article that would be 3 paragraphs is now shit all over a dozen pages...why should I care about you when you are trying to milk me for more revenue while making things worse for me?

I'll be happy to unblock a site if they ask nicely...IF they ONLY use txt ads, no risky Flash or Java ads, NO taking over my speakers, NO blasting commercials..they do that? I have NO problem with unblocking. The problem is all these sites are frankly lazy bastards that just want to make money without having to do the work so they just sell their ad space to any company that offers them cash without giving a fuck if its ads are rude, if they assault our senses, hell they don't even seem to give a fuck if they end up serving malware to their users, just as long as they get paid. Well I have to clean up their messes so fuck them, I install adblock as SOP to ALL PCs that come through my door.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Swallow it.

Nope. Hire someone who knows how to build a proper web page. Ad blockers are either blocking particular hosts, and/or denying execution of scripts. If you serve the ad up as PART of the page instead of referencing a foreign resource, and don't use scripts to do it, the blockers won't stop them.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[BrokenHalo]

I am not opposed to advertising on principle, but marketroids have acquired an unhappy disposition to assume that every vacant space visible to the human eye is fair game for intrusive ads. Ditto, any quiet instant is fair game for filling with obnoxious "BUY!BUY!BUY!" noises (which is why my sound-card is always muted by default).

The internet was never originally constructed for the convenience of advertisers, and it is beyond arrogance for them to assume that it is acceptable to swamp the user's bandwidth (which in many cases comes at a premium price) with inane drivel and referrals to all of their scaly mates in the industry.

Non-intrusive text advertising is fine (and in my case, occasionally even effective), but overly heavy-handed marketing drives me away from websites. I make sure of this by adding them to my hosts file.

If this means I miss out on some content, then so be it. Everybody loses.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[binarylarry]

It's not the customer's job to figure out how to keep businesses alive.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well that's all fine, except that it doesn't mate with the other realities of advertising that those sites have to deal with. The penny per click they get on a clearly marked text ad, out of every 4 trillion impressions, which come from 8 trillion page views, doesn't pay the bills. Now make it opt-in for ads, strictly text only links, reduce the page count and impressions, etc, and they're really screwed.

This is why pay walls are becoming more popular. People assume that any time they can't have 100% of what they want for free, that someone else must be being too greedy. That's bullshit.

So since you're never going to get what you want, the way you describe it, and they're not going to survive doing what they're doing, what's the alternative? That's a harder question to answer.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Non-intrusive text advertising is fine (and in my case, occasionally even effective), but overly heavy-handed marketing drives me away from websites. I make sure of this by adding them to my hosts file.

Advertising is about getting attention and quite frankly limiting it to text only is like limiting Formula One teams to 30 hp engines. Not that I care about advertisers but suggesting that they limit themselves to text only is naive.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[samkass]

Before Penny Arcade removed ads, they handled them rather well. They sold the ads in-house, only advertised products that they themselves approved of, and the ads were all either still images or minimal animation (no sound, no "shaking", no "one trick to lose weight"). I personally don't use an ad blocker because I believe in paying for what I use, and just stop visiting the obnoxious sites. I'm not sure Destructoid would like my solution either.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[JMJimmy]

It seemed to work just fine before everyone tried to commercialize things. The quote is "If you build it, they will come" not "If you build it, you will make money"

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Anonymous Coward]

| I'll be happy to unblock a site if they ask nicely...IF they ONLY use txt ads, no risky Flash or Java ads,...

Something that never gets mentioned about this is that honest ads never were blocked. An ad on the webpage, loaded from the same domain, will rarely be blocked. What is being blocked is sending people to Doubleclick (yes, people, not "users") and a half dozen other ad companies, without permission, allowing those companies to use their ads as spyware web beacons and to set cookies. The current advertising "norm" for webpages goes against the original intentions in the design of the Internet.

I use a HOSTS file and also block 3rd-party images. Further, I use userContent.css in Mozilla browsers to block web beacon images. But I don't block ads in the webpage. Some webmasters will say they can't make enough money with banner ads. Maybe so. But that does not justify sneaky spyware tactics that essentially hijack the browser.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Opportunist]

Dude, get with the times. It's Web 3.0 now, we're way past "build the content and make money". We're at "let your viewers make the content and make money".

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Teun]

I think you miss something.
The price paid for advertisements depends on the demography of the visitors to the site and the chances you can make some business from it.
Would the site in question only allow quality advertisements that are palpable to it's public the chances of business coming forth increases dramatically and so does the price per click.

Don't forget, it's all commercial and (should be) calculated for effectiveness.

Besides, those running AdBlock are the least likely to click on an advertisement anyway, nothing lost.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Registered Coward v2]

It seemed to work just fine before everyone tried to commercialize things. The quote is "If you build it, they will come" not "If you build it, you will make money"

To a certain extent, yes.However, free is not sustainable for most sites and users show a distinct disinclination to pay for content. Without a way to at least cover costs sites will eventually fold. That's not bad, because there is a lot of crap out there; but ultimately after you build it and they come you need to figure out a way to keep it going.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Opportunist]

Yes, but it's like the old tale of wind and sun competing who gets the guy to take off his jacket. Wind blew and blew and all that accomplished was him to tighten his grasp on the jacket, sun instead shined and the guy took off the jacket voluntarily.

If you try to FORCE me to do something, expect me to resist. Give me what I want and you may expect me to cooperate.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[gTsiros]

That's why i initially said it's a flawed way to keep a site up.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[White Flame]

Web surfing is about finding specific information and quite frankly polluting it with ads is like limiting Formula One teams by making them tow a RV and putting a ferret in their helmet.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Runaway1956]

That's pretty awful, isn't it? You whore yourself to advertisers, who may or may not exploit vulnerabilities in a person's system, but always make using your site more unpleasant. That doesn't work, so you set up a pay wall. And, nobody pays to see what you've got behind the paywall.

I guess that spells bankruptcy for you, huh?

Well, tough shit. You should have thought things over long ago. Offer a product that people really want, and offer it for a reasonable price. You failed to offer a reasonably priced product that people want? Well - screw you - go hungry. No one gives a small damn about you. You tried to milk the cash cow, but you never even warmed your hands up before grabbing hold of the cow's teats. When she kicks you in the head, don't expect any sympathy from anyone at all.

Bankruptcy, dude. Now, kindly fuck off and die.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Runaway1956]

Most criminals make money dishonestly. That makes criminal activity alright?

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Captain Hook]

It gets attention, but the wrong sort, overly obnoxious ads create a negative association to both the product being advertised and website hosting the ad.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[wvmarle]

What really got me to first block Flash, later block all ads is a news paper that I regular visits and that posts several bright coloured and flashing ads right next to the artical that I'm trying to read.

It's impossible to ignore them. That's of course the purpose of the designer, but it's so bad that I could just not read the article. Moving my browser to have them fall off-screen is a solution, but it's still irritating.

Now I have Flashblock and ABP. I know many web sites make money by showing me ads, but they're simply too distracting. I don't mind a static image. Or a simple text ad, Google style (and when searching for commercial stuff on Google I will unlock them, as the ads tend to give more useful results than the search results).

ABP is simply on for all sites. Maybe there are some that display those acceptable ads, I'm not going to try, sorry about that. Also not going to manually block sites one by one when I run into one with obnoxious ads.

Actually only one site where I see the ads, and that's becuase they serve them by themselves so they're not filtered. That is a trade site, where the ads are from their members, so very appropriate. They sometimes flash (animated GIF) but that's all. And with the limited size, it's not really bothering me. That is advertising that makes sense.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Mr. Slippery]

The penny per click they get on a clearly marked text ad, out of every 4 trillion impressions, which come from 8 trillion page views, doesn't pay the bills.

The price for common things is low. The price for rare things is high.

Make ads rare. And make them meaningful, a deliberate and knowing sponsorship relationship between publisher and advertiser rather than space for rent to the highest bidder..

And for cryin' out loud, serve them from your own server. No cross-site ad networks spying on us.

I'm still not going to click on them, because when I'm reading your site I'm not shopping, I'm reading.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Dogtanian]

So what? Most Dutch investments in 1636 were in tulips. They didn't have a god-given right to make money, either.

Well, that's true- and taken at its absolutely literal face value, the story as summarised (and discussion) is simply about funding a particular website business.

However, the vast majority of readers will clearly understand that the *actual* issue being implied was how one can fund reputable and quality journalism online. *That* is the issue that concerns us- Demonoid's business model is a means to an end, and it's the "end" result *we* enjoy. But clearly the end requires a means, and that's why Demonoid's funding is *our* problem if we enjoy and/or respect what they are producing.

This doesn't mean that advertising is the only solution, and indeed it could be argued that it's an inefficient and overly intrusive method of funding (both in terms of trying to grab attention and in terms of potential corporate interference). Problem is that no obvious alternatives have come up yet- micropayments... what happened to them? Voluntary subscriptions and donations... well, sorry, but generally *very* few people do that. Paid subscriptions? Might work for some sites (e.g. Financial Times), but not all, and it restricts access, relying on a few higher-paying users than many low-paying users, so it's a lose-lose. (I'd rather access lots of sites that made small amounts of money from lots of users than a few sites that made more money from fewer users- the question is, how do we do that without advertising.... "microsubscriptions" perhaps? The latter still doesn't cover occasional one-off visits to sites that have specific useful info or a story I might want to read, but don't plan on visiting regularly... so we're back to the start).

Do we need to have paid journalism and content? Some would argue that we can go back to the early days of the web, when most content was user-created and non-commercial... but believe me, the fact that it was all new and exciting then (and a long time ago) obscures the fact that if you went back in time you'd realise there was far, *far* less content available online than there is today. Of course, there are more people online, and Wikipedia is a good model for donation-funded, user-written content. But could that exist without the support of the rest of the web, and would the model work if *every* website expected to be funded and driven in that way? I'm not convinced.

Anyway, one isn't obliged to care. One could say that if Demonoid are offering free ad-funded content, and we can see it without viewing the ads that's their problem, and we'll take advantage of it... well, while it lasts. It's a legitimate response... provided you accept that it cuts both ways- you (or anyone else) have no god-given right to expect quality content, and if one doesn't care about the means (or providing an alternative to it), then you're waived your moral right to complain when the good sites go under and there is either little content, or the content that remains is is utterly vapid, worthless, contemptible corporate-sponsored garbage.

And believe me, that *is* the true issue that is- or should be- being discussed here.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[dzfoo]

However, free is not sustainable for most sites and users show a distinct disinclination to pay for content.

That is not necessarily true. Users show a distinct disinclination to pay for crappy or mediocre content. Since the birth of capitalism, people have paid for stuff. Everybody buys stuff.

The problem is that some people believe that the Internet changed all that, as if it was some sort of magical entity that made content free.

The WWW started with all sorts of free content, because it was provided by enthusiasts and academics, who didn't mind giving it away for free.

And then it all went to hell in a hand-basket when some wanted to maintain the same level of traffic and engagement in the mass market while making money out of it.

Yes, that's the problem: greed. Every - Single - Site - built to make money follows the same exact formula: Make content, give it away for free, build a very large audience, and then--just when you think you've captured them irrevocably--make money out of them. Well, guess what, you've just accustomed your viewers to free content. You have turned them into "freetards" that feel entitled to it all.

Yes, it's the "Web 2.0" model: Let's build a site, start free, get lots and lots of hits, and... sell it to Facebook or Google. Ka-ching!

Oh, that's not working? How do we keep the lights on? Ads to the rescue! It's not about the content or the viewers anymore.

Making your business model depend on advertisements shifts the focus of your enterprise absolutely. As even Penny-Arcade mentioned when they changed their model, a lot of their creative and business effort goes into satisfying metrics that come from their actual customers: the advertisers. The viewers are just there to consume the advertisements and keep the coin rolling in.

Of course, you can find the honest enterprise that just got trapped by following the trends. That seems to be the case with Destructoid, whereas they built their site to depend on advertisements because, well, because "that's how everybody does it and there's no other way."

If you adopt a model that is tangentially related to your viewers, and at times actively hostile to them, is it any surprise that they will get pissed when you engage in an arms race against their standard behaviour? How dare you take umbrage at their distaste for something that is not germane to the experience of visiting your site?

On the other hand, begging to be white-listed is also distasteful. Guess what? If every "free," advertisement-supported site were to die tomorrow, the Internet will survive. People will just find something else to do. And eventually, someone may hit upon a model that is actually sustainable. It'll probably involve some sort of subscription or direct payment.

I, like most ad-blockers, would not mind at all paying for content. As a matter of fact, I do subscribe to some web sites and e-magazines. I don't pay for every single article I casually visit when I click on a link; and I just click on the link because it's there. I don't need it. I don't have to have it. And when I hit a paywall or something else that alienates me, I consider hard what's it worth to me. "Oh, it's just a link to an article in the WSJ about such-and-such, is it really that important for me to pay to read it?" Probably not.

Sometimes it is. I've ended up purchasing issues of the New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal for a single article.

So when all this sites band together and clamour "you're breaking the Internet! your adblock is killing the Internet!" I say, NO. We're just breaking the stupid, unsustainable cycle of web sites trying to make money by every other way except working for their readers.

          -dZ.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Most reputable sites will only subscribe to ad services that are themselves reputable. Some even have tiers of how irritating they want the ads to be, allowing or not popups and so on.

I don't know why the GP was worried about viruses -- what kind of sites do they regularly visit and click on the ads?

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Another ad a loathe are those which try to mimic the site or even applications. If I get tricked to click on an ad, I'll buy your competitor's product out of spite.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Weezul]

If you serve the ads yourself, then afaik no ad blockers block them.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[nametaken]

Make ads rare. And make them meaningful

What's funny is this is what Facebook mastered, and everyone seems to hate them for it. They can make huge revenues with relatively few advertisements because they have amazingly great targeting.

It's simple, really. People pay more for ads that work. One way you do that is by having your ads shown only to the right people in the first place. That targeting only works through an engine that knows things about you... like Facebook.

It's also why Facebook hasn't and won't sell off their user data. Their exclusive access to that data is their big competitive advantage, the crown jewels, and it's something Google desperately wants.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[MightyYar]

You have it exactly right. If you absolutely want to be sure that your ads are being served to most of your customers, host them yourself and don't make them so intrusive that it is worth some else's time to parse and block them from your site.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[PlusFiveTroll]

> and click on the ads?

Not necessary. With Flash and Java all the virus writer needs is a 0-day in the plug-in and you still get pwned, even if you only visit 'trusted' sites. Also some of the jackass flash ads that are small for a moment then explode to half the screen size if you get close to them make accidental clicks common.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[PlusFiveTroll]

... like limiting Formula One teams to 30 hp engines

Very odd analogy to pick.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_One_car#Recent_FIA_performance_restrictions

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[noh8rz10]

do you think the employees of the site shouldn't get paid? or shouldn't have aspirations for themselves or their families? maybe you think they should take a vow of poverty to provide you free content that you read when you should be working.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Kozz]

I'm not him but I'll be happy to list why its fucked up..1.- A VERY large portion of the viruses out there end up through infected ads, block ads? Virus infections drop off the map.

THIS, a thousand times THIS. Many years ago I watched as an advertising network pushed a flash-based ad that delivered a malicious PDF, exploited a hole in Adobe Reader, and screwed up the machine. Of course it was Windows, yes. But ever since then, I remove Adobe Reader from all machines I support (myself and family), I run AdBlockPlus, Flashblock. THAT's why I block ads.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[noh8rz10]

no, but it's the customer's concern if their favorite websites go out of business. Liked that offbeat coffeeshop on the corner? too bad, they went under and became a starbucks. enjoy your mocha-soy-double-room-half-calf-frappuchino.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[mabhatter654]

The money has to come from somewhere. If YOU aren't paying to read the website, then they have to have some form of sponsorship....

Server space and traffic isn't free once you get past the "hobby" size.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[__aaltlg1547]

That's pretty awful, isn't it? You whore yourself to advertisers, who may or may not exploit vulnerabilities in a person's system, but always make using your site more unpleasant. That doesn't work, so you set up a pay wall. And, nobody pays to see what you've got behind the paywall.

I guess that spells bankruptcy for you, huh?

Well, tough shit. You should have thought things over long ago. Offer a product that people really want, and offer it for a reasonable price. You failed to offer a reasonably priced product that people want? Well - screw you - go hungry. No one gives a small damn about you. You tried to milk the cash cow, but you never even warmed your hands up before grabbing hold of the cow's teats. When she kicks you in the head, don't expect any sympathy from anyone at all.

Bankruptcy, dude. Now, kindly fuck off and die.

Ads targeted to your public don't always make your site more unpleasant. Suppose you're a local newspaper's online site. People read it to know what's going on in their town. If there's an ad on the page that advertises that the local nursery is having a Mother's day sale on petunias or the bar on Main St. is having a St. Patrick's day event. I don't think that bothers anyone. What bothers people is when the ad is not germaine to the reading public, or is too intrusive, for instance with animations or sounds or excessively large text or obnoxious pictures.

While we're on Slashdot, let's talk Slashdot. It's ad-supported after all. If you're reading an article about some cool thing somebody did with Arduino, an ad for where you can buy your own Arduino or similar device or get toolkits for development wouldn't be the least bit out of place. Readers might actually appreciate it. An Flash-enabled video ad for penis pills is probably going to draw ire.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[__aaltlg1547]

I'm not that impressed with Facebook's targeting. I see tons of garbage sponsored links and "recommendations" that I seriously doubt my specific friends would recommend.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[justin12345]

"Let your viewers make the content and make money" was Web 2.0.

Web 3.0 is "Don't make money no matter who builds the content."

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[mabhatter654]

That sounds way more interesting than just driving in a circle!

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[aaaaaaargh!]

Exactly. Whether you want to use an ad blocker or not is your personal choice. If destructoid or anyone else's website don't get enough ad revenue, that's their problem. I personally use ad blockers and do not care at all whether websites I frequent vanish because of that or not. Other sites with other sources of revenue will replace them. Or, if not, I will have to pay for my news if I really want it so desparately. (By the same token, of course, I do not care for websites that try to block ad blockers. If I see a popup telling me to switch off my ad blocker, I'll simply point my browser somewhere else.)

It is wrong to claim that the market always regulates itself, after all there are monopolies, business cartels, closed markets, chaotic market behavior and instability, etc., but in this case it does just fine.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[LordLimecat]

WHats beyond arrogance is you assuming that you have more than an advisory role in what goes onto a website. Every blank spot on the page IS fair game, because its not your website.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[russotto]

I see tons of garbage sponsored links and "recommendations" that I seriously doubt my specific friends would recommend.

Probably part of the evil plan.

Step 1) Build up a good reputation by providing legitimate recommendations based on valid data including preferences of friends.

Step 2) Spend some of that reputation to get cold hard cash by slipping totally unjustified paid "recommendations" in there.

However, Facebook probably skipped Step 1 entirely. There's no reason in principle this evil plan couldn't work indefinitely provided you kept the paid recommendations to a small proportion, but greed pretty much ensures that you wouldn't, so instead of a slow burn of replenishable reputation, the evildoer burns it all out at once.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[click2005]

Why are you trying to blame the readers when the problem lies with the advertisers?

I'm just like most people.

I dont have a problem with adverts where I get to decide if the advert interests me.
I dont have a problem with bright or colourful adverts.
I dont have a problem when I get to choose if I give you information.

If you try to ram it down my throat I will block it.
If you make it annoying or distracting I will block it.
If you assume you can collect information I will block it.

I am not data or a product, I am a potential customer. If you try to treat me as anything else I will block you.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Except, if your site is already specialized, I don't think you really need all the personal data to target properly. A video game review site can sell ad space for, uh, video games. And as long as they stay away from exclusive deals for advertising a certain studio's games, I think they can avoid being mouthpieces for the studios.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Anonymous Coward]

> I'll be happy to unblock a site if they ask nicely.

Slashdot gives me an option to hide adds. Just because I want to be a pain in ass, I refuse to hide adds on this site.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[LordKronos]

Yes, but it's like the old tale of wind and sun competing who gets the guy to take off his jacket. Wind blew and blew and all that accomplished was him to tighten his grasp on the jacket, sun instead shined and the guy took off the jacket voluntarily.

If you try to FORCE me to do something, expect me to resist. Give me what I want and you may expect me to cooperate.

Except that argument is BS. To put it in terms of your old tale, it's like the sun shined and shined and shined for years, but more and more people just put on their jackets. Then finally the wind starts blowing, and people get upset and say "if you'd just give me some sun instead of the wind, maybe I'd voluntarily take off my jacket".

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Snufu]

Yes, but Wind won round two, where they competed to get the guy to put his jacket back on.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[0111 1110]

You can pay for Pay TV, you'll still get ads.

This is a fairly recent 'innovation'. It used to be that the whole point of paid TV was to avoid ads. I would never pay for something that is being ad-funded anyway.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[C0R1D4N]

I can only imagine where TV would be today if advertisers expected you to stop in the middle of the show and click through to their website right at that moment.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[0111 1110]

Provide a service and people who want that service pay to use it.

There are degrees of want. People have to want it enough to pay for it and very often that is not going to be true. I cannot think of many sites I would even pay $1/month to view. If they set up a pay wall or had intrusive advertising that I had no way to block I would just stop visiting the site.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[0111 1110]

Proxy based ad blockers? You mean like proxomitron?

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[bwcbwc]

Screw the realities of advertising. If a site is willing to risk infecting their viewers and themselves for a few extra bucks a month, and they block me for using NoScript, they (and their advertisers) don't deserve my business.
https://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/092810-study-top-web-sites-riskier.html

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[aaaaaaargh!]

However, the vast majority of readers will clearly understand that the *actual* issue being implied was how one can fund reputable and quality journalism online.

Practically no online sites that are primarily paid by advertisement revenue offer reputable and quality journalism. Sorry to be so blunt and if that hurts the feelings of some journalists and tech writers on /. or Ars, but for quality journalism you have to consult the New York Times, the BBC and a bunch of other online presences of paid newspapers and TV channels (many of which are state-sponsored with constitutional guarantees for their independence), and not "tech blogging and news aggregation site X."

Luckily this does not concern /. because there is no journalism on /. anyway.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[HiThere]

Actually, I stopped watching TV. (I'm not the original poster, but...)

I don't have Flash installed on my system. I don't have Java enabled in the browser. Whan a site gets too annoying I either stop visiting it or turn off Javascript. (But turning off Javascript is annoying, since many sites that I visit use it reasonably, like Slashdot. So I generally just stop visiting.)

I once used Ad-blocker. For about a week I think. I decided it wasn't worth the aggravation.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Hal_Porter]

Except that I don't really care about tulips. I do care about having people write an interesting articles on the net. So the profitability of people doing that does matter to me.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[HiThere]

Do you really think the New York Times or the BBC are unbiased?

Sorry. There *is* no unbiased source for news of any description. All you can do is check with multiple sources, and try to figure out what's most likely to be really going on. All you *know* is what you directly perceive, and even that's a bit dubious. (Consider the man in the Gorilla suit that walked across the basketball game. Or the demonstration where someone is stabbed with a banana.)

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Deathlizard]

The key word here is "They sold the ads in-house" Most ad blockers will not block in house ads since most of the ad lists target the big players (google, adchoices, ETC)

This is Destructoid. They should have no problem getting advertisers lined up for an in house system. At least it will be their fault instead of their ad partner when they infect their viewers, and once that reality sinks in, they might be less inclined to accept active content and focus on safer alternatives such as animated gif's or text based ads instead of HTML5 or Flash.

As for me with ads, I Use adblockplus with the non-obtrusive advertising turned on. Especially when Ads are more Virulent than Pornbut at least the good ads get through.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[paxprobellum]

It's Destructoid, not Demonoid. (Ironically enough, Demonoid is that torrent site you use to steal software, music, and movies. Good thing you unblocked them on ABP so *they* don't disappear...)

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Another way of looking at a similar (if not identical) chain of events is that the free content starts as a hobbyist project. Somebody provides content for free because they enjoy it. Because they produce quality content, they gain fans over time, and eventually the demands for more content and cost of maintaining the growing infrastructure to support the growing user base exceeds what can be swallowed as a loss for a hobby.

At this point the content provider can choose to ask users to pay (something that alienates a lot of fans) or you can sell advertising space (a solution which, in theory, scales with your user base). Any user-focused provider will seek advertising before a paywall because, to them, it isn't about the money, it is about the content and the audience. Oftentimes it isn't about making money, it is about not losing it. This, of course, doesn't work out as well as expected for many reasons (ad-blcokers being one of them) and effort has to be shifted to revenue generation to pay the bills.

Amateur radio and public-access television didn't have these problems because the cost to produce and broadcast is fixed, regardless of the size of the audience. The free-to-consumer model of television and radio took a huge market share from the magazine and newspaper industry, which faced the same scaling costs the internet, as a publishing medium, faces today. The best model to use as a baseline is the magazine industry (which uses subscriptions to cover distribution costs but ads to provide revenue) which is what sites are trying to do. Then people view without the ads and the model falls apart. Arguably, if sites used less intrusive and annoying ads, this would be far less of a problem as fewer people would block them, but the situation is what it is and the prevalence of ad-blockers that take out the benign as well as offensive are the norm.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[daveime]

> If there's an ad on the page that advertises that the local nursery is having a Mother's day sale on petunias or the bar on Main St. is having a St. Patrick's day event. I don't think that bothers anyone. Except all the privacy nutters who've blocked all possible methods of understanding WHO you are and what you like, so that an ad can be served that might be relevant to you. It's the equivalent of going down to your local bar, and kicking the crap out of the barman for daring to know "your usual" aka "invading your privacy".

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[flimflammer]

There does not appear to be a place for you anywhere on the Internet if that is your feelings. You feel no inkling towards the sites you visit, so the odds of you paying a subscription are negligible at best. You will deprive ad-supported content from making revenue off of your visit, because you don't support the model...

There is literally no place for you, because those are pretty much the only options; paying them directly or paying them indirectly. You want neither, so the Internet will eventually become hostile to you.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Dogtanian]

No that is what we are blocking "utterly vapid, worthless, contemptible corporate-sponsored garbage".

No, I'm talking about the site content itself becoming that, not just the ads.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Dogtanian]

You seem to be under the impression that we can get anything but "utterly vapid, worthless, contemptible corporate-sponsored garbage". Please open your eyes. You can pay for Pay TV, you'll still get ads. You can watch ads, you'll still get product placement and biased reporting.

Er, yeah, I can. I live in the UK, I get the BBC.

It's not perfect, but it's far from the aforementioned "utterly vapid, worthless, contemptible corporate-sponsored garbage".

Obviously this doesn't apply to the US, where any attempt to apply a similar model would be doubtless be considered "socialist" anathema by the majority- but that's their (your?) choice.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Dogtanian]

It's Destructoid, not Demonoid. (Ironically enough, Demonoid is that torrent site you use to steal software, music, and movies. Good thing you unblocked them on ABP so *they* don't disappear...)

My mistake, but while I've heard of Demonoid- probably on Slashdot hence my familiarity with the name- *I* don't recall ever having used it (if I had, I probably wouldn't have confused it with a gaming review site that I first heard of today- I'm not a gamer either).

Also, I don't use AdBlock Plus, only Flashblock. (Yes, I'm aware that this is still- in effect- a more limited form of ad blocking, albeit against the more egregious and risky forms.)

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Joce640k]

This.

The ad blockers aren't blocking your site, they're blocking the external sites which serve up random eye-distractions and viruses.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Pentium100]

The ads on a newspaper are targeted (since nobody would advertise on a newspaper in a different city than the business is) and text or static picture only. No animation, no blinking, no flash that loads the CPU and most importantly - no sound and no malware.

Also, the websites have too many ads. In some sites there's like 10 or more ads in a single page and the article is split to 10 pages (even though it would take 4 A4 pages at most if printed) that take forever to load because of the ads and the fact that the ads are hosted on a different server.

I don't watch broadcast TV, mainly because there's nothing interesting, but when I find something interesting, I first record it to tape, then I can fast forward the commercials.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Pentium100]

Ad blockers are opt-in by default. The user has to be annoyed by the ads enough to go to a web site, download and install the ad blocker. Then it becomes opt-out by default, which is great for the annoyed user because now he won't be annoyed by the ads or prompts to enable ads.

Noscript is even more annoying at first (before all the main sites I visit were added to white or black lists), but that only means that I was annoyed enough to to use NS in the first place.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Pseudonym Authority]

Bullshit, you'll still come here to bitch about how it should be free and that you hate giving your CC# to shady sites.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[hairyfeet]

No I think they should stand by their product as I do. Think if I handed out a virus to my customers I wouldn't have to clean up the mess? Then why in the fuck should THEY get a free pass for doing the same? They have no fucking clue as to whether the ads they are serving is malicious or not and frankly I have yet to see a single indicator that they give a rat's ass one way or the other as long as the checks roll in.

If your business model is flawed that is YOUR problem, not mine. There is a REASON why adblock suddenly exploded, its because people got tired of having to shell out nearly a c-note to guys like me because sites like Destructoid gave them a zero day and got tired of having their senses assaulted by blaring ads. Why do you think nobody cared about blocking ads for the longest time? Because at the worst they were little GIFs and hyperlinks. Now if you block ads you can watch the risk of infection drop right off the chart, before adblock I'd see some customers 3 or 4 times a year, after? Now I only see them when they need hardware upgrades.

Like it or not the current ad system is BROKEN, its broken because there is ZERO responsibility when it comes to passing out infections with the ads (look up the figures on where people get viruses from, you'll see more than half comes from infected ads so blocking ads just cut your risk in half) and its broken because they show ZERO respect for their customers by letting blaring ads take over the page, fucking up the flow and making web surfing frankly unpleasant.

So either take responsibility, make sure all ads are checked BEFORE they go lie for the presence of malware, stop allowing blaring ads, and stop fucking up page layouts to try to milk us for ad money. If you don't like it? Then your ass better be coming up with a new model, something to replace the current broken mess with something more secure and user friendly because its my job to protect my customers and that means blocking your malware ridden ads.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Yaotzin]

None the less, it will affect the customer if the business fails. I doubt most people running ad-blockers even stop to think about how their favourite website depends on them seeing adverts. I do but I've worked for an ad-revenue supported website and what I did was selling ad space, so I hardly consider myself the average reader. Even so, I still block most sites. I'd say the biggest problem with this whole phenomenon is that techy sites are more likely to be hurt. Otherwise it wouldn't be much of a problem since advertisers would just have accept that their scripts are enabling ad-blockers and ditch them. As it is, they'll just spend their money on websites with less tech-savy readers.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[hairyfeet]

Hear Hear and I would only ad that the current ad system has become such a haven for malware it makes the old porn topsite pages look clean by comparison. When you can cut a person's risk of getting malware by more than half by simply blocking ads honestly you'd be a fool NOT to block ads.

Now I have argued for years that we need to replace JavaScript and the current "Hey we'll crap the content all over the place and use third party dynamic content to "build" the page" for something designed from the ground up with security in mind, JavaScript was designed in a less hostile world than we have now and every thing we've tried from sandboxes to scan before load AV plugins have been bandaids on the bullet wound that is the current "Web 3.0" design model. But even if you don't agree with me surely everyone can see how big a problem the current system is when you look at how the vast majority of viruses the average user gets will be from infected ads.

Are these websites gonna pay to have any viruses they deliver removed? Then why in the fuck should I care that you go under if you have built your entire business model around forcing me to play roulette with the security of my system? I have found the single biggest security measure you can perform on a user's system is to block ads, yet you tell me I have to put all my customers at risk because you can't find a way to make money any other way? Fuck you lazy web devs, either stand by your product and make damned sure not a single ad you serve is a source of malware or find another business model because as long as ads are the #1 attack vector every customer WILL be getting adblock from me PERIOD.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[hairyfeet]

Then you use a different business model. With my last band people said "You'll never make enough off of just CDs to do more than break even" and they were right, yet we were clearing a couple grand a night...how? Simple, if one business model doesn't work you find another, in our case I got a local graphics artist to design us a cool logo which we put on shirts to supplement the CD sales. Also to get people to buy more stuff we'd have little contests and every sale gave you another shot at the prize. While others were lucky to sell 30 CDs a night we'd end up selling 200 plus a ton of shirts.

If your current business model doesn't work you change the model, simple as that. The world doesn't owe you jack shit, and the ad companies have sealed their fate by not giving a shit if they served malware thus making adblocking the single biggest security measure you can perform, so either adapt and come up with new models or die. After cleaning so damned many systems that have gotten infections from ads I really find it hard to have any sympathy for companies that make their living off of risking their users.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[zarlino]

Making your business model depend on advertisements shifts the focus of your enterprise absolutely.

Well before the internet, magazines and newspapers relied on advertisements so I fail to see where the "shift of focus" is.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[hairyfeet]

Oh bullshit, that is just being a lazy asshole. Its called common damned sense which needs ZERO info to target ads. If I am on Ars reading a review of the latest AMD GPUs should you show me ads for baby strollers? NO you should show me ads for GPUs! How fucking hard is that? This is the era of niches, every page being focused on a topic, yet you are honestly telling me you are too damned clueless to figure out what to show me without following me around like some peeping tom? What the fuck?

Its laziness, that is ALL it is, not even bothering to spend a whole 5 minutes to find out what a website is about or what the target audience is. Fuck most websites wouldn't even take 5 minutes, look at Slashdot, there are several sections and each are pretty damned obvious as to which ads you should target to which section. YRO? Privacy related hardware and software. Cloud? SaaS and cloud management solutions. Fuck this ain't brain surgery, its pretty damned obvious and I don't need to know jack shit about you to target those ads, just by seeing what pages you are currently looking at one can get a good idea of what they like. Its no different than Amazon with their "You are looking at this? Well many people that look at this also buy that, would you like to buy that too?" recommendations in that you don't need to know jack shit about the customer, just by monitoring your end you can learn enough to target effectively as long as you bother to do the work.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[aminorex]

Its not hard to defeat ad blockers: Just serve the ads inline.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[hairyfeet]

I just wanted to say thanks for the link and it proves what I've thought for quite awhile, that web ads are riskier than the porn topsites were back in the day. I see more infected systems from ads than by any other method which is why my SOP is to give them adblock.

If you ran a bar and 5 out of every 10 cars that parked in your lot were broken into, how long do you think you'd stay in business? That is the current state of web advertising in a nutshell only instead of doing something about the break ins they have the brass balls to blame US for not wanting to risk our cars being broken into...fuck you, if the only way you can stay in business is to make it easier for crooks to break into my system then go OOB.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[aaaaaaargh!]

I said that I would pay if I really want to. Obviously, anybody who really wants something and has the money will pay for it. But more importantly, I have a place in reality and do not really feel a need to have a "place on the Internet" (whatever that is supposed to mean).

But even more importantly, there were plenty of good places on the Net before it was occupied by greedy corporations. I'm old enough to remember.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[aaaaaaargh!]

Umph, today must be "general misinterpretation day." I didn't say they are unbiased, I suggested they are more reputable and of higher quality than any purely ad-sponsored news service you can only find on the Internet. And yes, I really think so.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Opportunist]

Not really, the sun shone and we didn't bother to wear jackets. Only when some started to think that we still did because we didn't bother looking at their sun and started to crank up the wind machine, we put it on.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[myowntrueself]

It's not about the content or the viewers anymore.

I just thought I'd pull this one sentence out of your post and then point at the music and movie industries.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Opportunist]

Hmm.... Odd, I'd have guessed sun would have won that one, too. Wind had to invest a lot of energy, when all sun had to do is simply set.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[hairyfeet]

Thanks and this subject REALLY pisses me off with regard to the attitude of the web masters. I mean I'm not asking for much here, just that you don't put my system at risk by using third party ad companies and don't blow my speakers...yet they act like this is a big hardship. Most of the adblocks are VERY easy on first party content and if you just say "We are hosting our own ads with no flash and java, would you please unblock us?" I've found a lot of folks will do just that...but if you then break that trust by going to doubleclick or some other web tracking malware provider? Well fuck you you'll never get unblocked again.

Frankly I think we geeks need to get together and set a standard for ads, after all we are being most reasonable and WE are the ones that end up cleaning up the messes when a zero day splatters across the networks. First party, no flash or java, no speaker blasting...this sounds like a fair and reasonable compromise to me and would make it so they could show ads without the users playing Russian Roulette with their security. That sounds fair doesn't it?

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Opportunist]

No, the sun simply gave the guy what he wanted: Warmth. I don't need a jacket when it's hot enough to melt asphalt. IIRC it was wind who proposed the bet because he deemed himself stronger, but then again, it's just a fable. And its core message is that you will more easily convince someone to do your bidding if you give him what he wants instead of trying to force him to. Sun simply dished out what the guy wanted from his jacket, so it was trivial to convince him to do so.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[isorox]

That sounds way more interesting than just driving in a circle!

That's NASCAR. F1 turn left AND right.

Still like watching paint dry.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[TapeCutter]

All you can do is check with multiple sources, and try to figure out what's most likely to be really going on.

Yes, but what the OP is saying is that when you do, they will find "what's really going on" is best matched by reputable sources such as the BBC and NYT. "Reputable" means the majority of people who care enough to regularly compare sources about their pet issue say they have a good track record.

"Perception is everything" - well, that appears to be the case. ;)

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Kasar]

Many sites that once had 2-3 ads on a page apparently decided that they needed a dozen or more to try and get around adblockers, just like the drug spammers who try anything to get through, as if you must buy it if they defeat your filter. I still whitelist sites I use regularly, but didn't think of it until one posted a simple request and explanation, and when whitelisted, it had pretty unobtrusive ads. Others, I whitelist them, get inundated with garbage, and remove them right away.
The ball is in their court.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[fyngyrz]

You know what, though? I keep a website up. I write free, optionally donation supported software. Which has thousands of users (which represents a huge success in a very narrow niche.) I have a few things on there that can earn (I sell a t-shirt through Zazzle every few months or so, mainly.) I make donations available, but neither mandatory or nagging -- that's resulted in $120 over a period of one year. The site costs me about $40 every three months, plus name registration, so about $200/year, realistically.

I do it because I like to do it. People do come. But I never assumed it was going to support me or go so far as to break even. Yet, there the website is, no abusive ads (I source my own t-shirt ads... they're just images / css tricks. No audio, no video, no abuse of mouse hovering, no cracking articles into ridiculous numbers of pages.)

The world is full of other things we can do to earn. I'm not sure that the Internet's ability to share information and the commercial interest of maximizing earnings was ever a good fit.

Free is sustainable. There have always been people who do things on the web with a primary goal of sharing (whatever it is) and I can't say I'd shed any tears for sites that have a purely commercial model that involves no more than information transfer.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[sjames]

Not when the consequence of not limiting themselves is to cause 50% of their audience to block all ads forever.

Imagine an F1 race where some of the teams take it literally and install F1 rocket engines and the cars explode into tiny pieces within the first 10 meters. Sure, it's spectacular but they lose the driver, part of the audience, the car, and the race because of their overreach.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[fyngyrz]

Broadcast TV? Broadcast radio? Both of those only work because the advertisement is inserted into the stream

No. They work because governments give commercial interests a monopoly. That's the only reason they work. The current cost to set up a radio station? Near a million bucks, time, lawyers, etc. The actual cost, meaning, what it would cost me to do it without the government interfering? About $250.00. But I can't do that. So the only music / entertainment choice you have, is, ta-da, a commercial one. The benefit? The commercial stations are arranged so they don't interfere with one another (except for AM at night, which is just as chaotic as a license free environment would be, and you'll note it hasn't harmed AM radio in the least.) There are no other benefits.

Without that monopoly, you'd have choices that did not abuse you with advertising, play only limited playlists, and pre-digest your news. With it, you have exactly one choice: you will consume the commercial stream, or you will consume nothing.

If the government ever does the same thing to the Internet -- disallows content provision unless you jump through very expensive hoops -- you can look forward to the commercial model working perfectly fine.

The problem right now with the Internet is that the commercial model is trying to co-exist with free, user driven content -- a considerable amount of which is better than what the commercial sites supply. That is why they can't hold on to users.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[buddyglass]

Your comment suggests a misunderstanding of the model he's using. The model isn't "watch ads in order to get free access; otherwise you don't get free access". His model is "everybody gets free access whether you watch the ads or not; oh, by the way, please watch the ads". Approximately half of his readers aren't willing to watch them.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Kasar]

People were already paying in 1994 and earlier, when most of the information was on university and government servers. They're run by different entities now, not funded by government grants and public funding.
I do remember those days, and mailbombing blatantly commercial marketers when they popped up, as if that would stop them. There were a lot of people against the commercialization of the Internet then, in spite of it's inevitability when the network transitioned.
All these years later, I find that I prefer the market system to a system where the government and it's agencies fund the sources.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Gabrill]

Well before the internet, magazines and newspapers relied on advertisements so I fail to see where the "shift of focus" is.

There isn't. Nobody with two eyes open takes the magazine articles at face value when the rags include advertisements from the companies in the reviews.

The internet made this worse. Instead of being able to read around the adverts in the magazines, now we must uncover the "useful" content from pop-over ads and distracting video and and sound.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[starfishsystems]

Is it meaningful to speak of something being "overly" obnoxious?

The term suggests that somewhere on the spectrum there must be "just the right amount" of obnoxiousness. But that right amount of obnoxiousness is zero by definition.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[GrahamJ]

dingdingding! People seem to forget that asking customers for money is the norm pretty much everywhere except the web. Not only would the web survive if all sites went pay, in many ways it would be better.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[rocket rancher]

If you serve the ads yourself, then afaik no ad blockers block them.

huh? If I see any ad (rare with ABP, even locally-hosted ads, but it does happen) I can manually block just that element with ABP's element killer functionality. Basically, I use it to kill any frame/element that contains content I'm not interested in at the moment. I use it on news sites to block news that I'm not interested in (who gives a fuck about sports news or movie reviews?) and I use it on ebay and amazon to block *everything* except the details of the item I'm purchasing. I use it to block those annoying social networking badges and icons that have started to show up everywhere. I use it on Netflix to block everything except the show launch elements. A few clever content creators have started putting sappy little "We see you are using an ad blocker, please consider whitelisting us" messages underneath the elements that ABP automatically blocks. I never go back to those sites -- so there's probably truth to the meme that relying on a revenue stream generated by serving advertising to people who don't want advertising is a bad thing to do.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[pixelpusher220]

I will not block ads from Slashdot. Or any site I frequent. However, if you outsource your ads so they come from a 3rd party I didn't agree to do business with? Block City baby.

Host ads yourself and I'll deal with them. But using the lazy and easily blockable way of having someone else do it for you means I get to have just as much lazy and easy to use blocking software.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[pixelpusher220]

Ever hear of the Humble Bundles?

It's funny, people give shit away for free and most people actually PAY them money in spite of it being freely available...from the same damn web page you pay.

There are new models out there for businesses to experiment with. Nobody's guaranteed payment for anything.

And the 'free' culture of the web is well entrenched because people understand that the 'copy' you're selling me is literally costing you nothing to create and, if you use modern distribution channels like bittorent, absolutely nothing to distribute it to me.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Compaqt]

How would it be better?

For most intents and purposes, it would simply cease to exist (outside of .edu and a few .org). As opposed to the inconvenience of having to view an ad but still being able to read almost all the newspapers of the world, you'd be limited to, basically, Geocities-style sites, updated every few months or so.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[DarkTempes]

For many years I only ran Noscript and tried to resist running ABP because I'm sympathetic towards ad supported websites, having once run one myself.

Then when I came across justin.tv/twitch.tv I ran into flash ads that were LOUD and did not obey their flash player mute settings and left a permanent small graphic over the video even after the ad was done.
That was too large of an insult for me and I immediately installed ABP.
Occasionally I whitelist small websites that have "We see you have ABP and we're begging for revenue" messages but generally the rest of the ad-supported web is going to pay until they get their act together as an industry and regulate themselves.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[yotto]

Back before AdBlock was prevalent I redirected all ad websites to a local server on my network that served up a random image from a large pool of images. Websites went from ad-infested crap to astronomy, video game, superhero, and geek images. It was pretty cool.

Then I found AdBlock and never looked back.

I surf on a cell phone for a large portion of the day. If I go over my limit, I have to pay them more. I'm not about to do so just so some website that I'll probably never visit again (because their content was spread over 12 pages to increase page views to an article with marginal interest to me in the first place) can make a tenth of a penny off of my eyeballs.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Darinbob]

I will gladly block any and all ads in order to get away from the abusive ads. As long as companies continue to support abusive ads then customers will continue to find ways to block them. I would rather not see the site than to surrender to the enemy.

(abusive means privacy violations, loud, annoying, CPU hogging, bandwidth hogging, and/or intrusive)

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[guardian-ct]

Best description so far of how I feel about most web ads these days. Too many creative types assume that the website visitors have the same multi-core fast graphics systems, and forget to put a CPU usage limiter on the flash ads. Oh, look cool ad, too bad I can't do anything else now until it stops playing, and sometimes not even then..

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Darinbob]

Web sites claiming innocence while passing their customers off to third party sites. Sort of like claiming you don't work for the mob but all financing has to be handled by Vinny next door.

Too bad some people with their look-at-me blogs lose money due to ad blockers, maybe they need a real career instead.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[stretch0611]

I agree...

For this, I personally use just Flashblock and NoScript. I do not use AdBlock.

Blocking Flash removes over 90% of the most annoying, blinking, and sound based ads.

Blocking javascript removes the tracking and reporting home to 3rd parties.

Whats left are text based and image based adds. Occasionally a few of the images are extremely annoying, and when I go to sites with those ads I learn quickly not to return.

20 years ago, there was a hatred towards any commercialization of the internet. I did not mind it, after all people have to pay the bills. However, when you become obnoxious, you do not deserve to profit. If you try to stealthily track peoples movements across the net, you deserve to die a quick death.

The fact is many of the worse offenders are bloggers. They all rehash the same BS and cry when its hard to make a buck. If you want to become rich, you should provide content worthy of drawing the masses, not garbage that only makes money due to screwing your tiny user base.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Darinbob]

Sort of reminds me of something similar. In the old days on Unix or VMS the software was often shared around, people would bring tapes to trade shows and go home with all sorts of goodies, or software would be traded on the network when that was available. There was a community of people there who shared, but nothing was shareware. Later on Amiga there were floppies passed around or sold at-cost full of software. Also a community of people who shared with extremely little shareware.

Then I got a PC and it all changed. Suddenly _everything_ was shareware, even crap that said "I wrote this to learn how to program, but if you use it you owe me $20". There was no community there at all, but there was plenty of shareware and people trying to make money. It was also the time when people started getting into computers and programming not because it was technical or interesting but because they heard you could make good money at it.

The difference was about having a community, and probably a hacker/enthusiast outlook. Same with computer networking.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Darinbob]

What's actually surprising to some people, is that there are those who actually want the weekly advertisers to show up in their physical mailbox. And those advertisers actually pay more than web advertisers do. So the idea of advertisement isn't dead, and the idea that everyone hates ads is wrong.

What's the big difference? Print advertisers give locally relevant ads. Print advertisers actually pay to get their ads delivered, whether or not they get read.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[stretch0611]

it's the customer's concern if their favorite websites go out of business. Liked that offbeat coffeeshop on the corner? too bad, they went under and became a starbucks.

I do agree with this, you should support businesses that you like. I also tend to prefer smaller Mom and Pop style businesses over the huge faceless corporate conglomerate.

However, if your tiny local business had a virus infecting their coffee the way some web advertisers install malware, I guarantee that you would never return. If they are blasting obnoxious noises inside their business the way audio ads hit your browser, you would likely not return either.

People will support you, if they like you. But, if you are obnoxious, you will not be liked.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Impeesa]

There was a time when Penny Arcade wouldn't even accept animation, too. This was also a time when I would still sometimes look at Gamespy, and every time I went there and found some obnoxious floating flash thing covering up the content I wanted to click, I made a point of closing it and giving one of Penny Arcade's ads a click instead.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Xeno man]

Still don't give a shit. Are they running a business or a charity? Business fail and close up shop every damn day, online or not. People invest in their dream with visions of working for them selves only to go out of business a few months or short years later and it's usually one of two things. Poor business plan or changing market. If your business is not making enough money, change your business to sell something else to a different market. The market will change too, change with it or fail.

Did you think about the poor families that worked at Blockbuster? Did you try renting movies while others were streaming them? Do you take all of your photos with film? Kodak is fading away while people use digital cameras now. Think about those people who might be unemployed. unless you support them.

Of course you didn't give a damn about those people and a web site is no different. Just because ads are the easiest and sometimes the only means of funding, doesn't mean that we as consumers should care if it's sufficient or not. Did you ever walk out of Walmart thinking, "If I only could have paid a little bit more for this stuff so these people can keep their jobs and help the company out a bit." Of course not. You want the lowest price with the easiest means to acquire your product. Web sites are no different. Some will find a way, some will disappear and how ever it ends up being, that will be okay.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[BrokenHalo]

The bandwidth argument is largely bunk, as most AdBlock users don't come anywhere near their quota and are not using phone-network pay-per-byte services.

You obviously don't live in rural Australia. I can't get any kind of wired connection to my home, so I am reliant on Telstra's so-called NextG network, which *is* severely restricted in bandwidth.

The reality is that web content costs money to create. Web sites cost money to run.

True, and I would have less of a problem with that if advertising were restricted to a per-site basis. However, advertisers are too greedy to be content with that, and I certainly don't feel any obligation to provide tracking data for just anyone to monetise.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[serviscope_minor]

What's funny is this is what Facebook mastered, and everyone seems to hate them for it. They can make huge revenues with relatively few advertisements because they have amazingly great targeting.

I'm in my 30s. Afer a straw poll among my (similarly aged friends), I came to this conclusion:

Male and unmarried (engaged counts): "Find hot singles in your area"

Female and unmarried: Dating!

Female and engaged: Buy wedding dresses

Femal and marries: Lose weight!

That is about the elvel of their targeting.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[serviscope_minor]

soy

You like to mock, but one of the advantage of that particular big evil chain is that they have realised that something like 20 or 30% of their customers (i.e. the population at large) cannot actually digest milk. That makes a huge difference to that 20 or 30%.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Ginger Unicorn]

I think that at some point, you just have to give up and accept that the analogy was too flimsy. Analogies should always be the absolute last resort, because they always have holes in them. Especially against a hostile opponent, who will willfully interpret every ambiguity in your analogy the exact wrong way.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Xest]

Yet Facebook has recently increase ads in their mobile app and they're consistently completely and utterly irrelevant to me.

So I'd wager that a) they haven't learnt the lesson you suggest, given that they've increase amount of ads, and that they seem to have no relevance, and b) even with the data they do have they're not very good at targeting with it.

For example, I don't post much on Facebook but the times I do it's usually to friends about games. I've never really liked much other than a few gaming pages (such as Minecraft).

So why when I'm a pretty trivially determinable target for game related advertising do I only ever get adverts about Marriott Hotels? Or designer clothes outlets and other such silly things in which I have exactly zero interest?

I'd actually rather Google did have their data, or Amazon for that matter. At least they seem to be able to figure out at least basic interests, and not just spam me with irrelevant crap that just sits in my way and annoys me because it's serving no purpose other than to waste my time and hence make me annoyed at the brand in question. Of course, ideally none of them would have it, but they have to make their money somehow I guess, and it's my choice to use their service.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Common Joe]

This. This is the solution that the poster wants: In house ads. If the ads are kept on their servers then they cannot be blocked but they also assume complete responsibility for what they show their customers. Their customers will know it is them who approved such ads. Go and read hairyfeet's responses to this article. There are lots of minefields we the readers are trying to avoid and could easily be brought in with this "new" method.

Make the ads in-house. Make sure the ads are not intrusive. Keep it simple. Simple means text and jpg. Text and jpg means virus free.

It will be interesting to see the evolution of ads and the commercial side of the Internet once this is common place.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Common Joe]

Sorry to reply to myself. One more thing: I don't do gaming, but if the summary is to be believed, Destructoid is independent. That is worth money. See for a model. Of course, if Destructoid is getting money from advertisers, I question their independence.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Naw, I think your ranting about FUD and not reality.

Google doesn't serve infected ads, neither do legit ad services. Its only when you start whoring out your site to all the poker sites and other lame adult related ad services that might pay well, but are sketchy operations. I.e. the Pirate Bay and a slew of other non-mainstream web sites.

Secondly, I mean, I just don't see ads. They are there, on the edges of the screen or in the corners, but after 20 years of using the web I just don't see them. I don't even know now web advertising is effective even without ad blockers, I have never clicked on an ad, on purpose at least, maybe a few stray clicks here and there.

Lastly, I avoid websites that abuse advertising, I don't block ads and continue to support those websites. I mean its pretty fucking stupid to support a web site using sketchy practices to advertise like pop-overs or unders or using crap ad services full of java or flash. If a website chooses to use those services, then I choose not to use the website, I don't just install an ad blocker and willfully support online crap.

Also, whats the point of online game websites. People ignore the reviews anyways and just buy crap like SimCity regardless of what the ratings are, so its pretty clear gamers are just fucking stupid for blocking ads to access websites and then ignoring the advice these websites have to offer.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Dogtanian]

You must not be familiar with PBS or other publicly funded or donation funded channels.

I am, I just didn't think they were anything like as significant as the BBC (at least, not for the size of audience they were addressing). And I've also heard that PBS relentlessly asks for donations, which many people find annoying.

We have publicly funded radio, too (NPR, although it tends to be *very* left-leaning politically - all hail Stalin / Mao!).

No offence, but given the kneejerk reaction of some Americans to label anything to the left of Genghis Khan as socialism or communism, I'd be pretty sceptical of what you describe as "*very* left-leaning politically - all hail Stalin / Mao". :-/

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Opportunist]

You're the guy who tells people fables with animals are flawed since they can't talk, right?

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[DickBreath]

> Swallow it.

That is very good advice, which I would second.

To websites that complain about ad blockers, I tell them that they brought it on themselves. One comment from TFA said "I honestly think people don't realize that by eliminating what is a mild annoyance from their lives, they put ours in jeopardy.".

Ads started out as a minor annoyance. When they were just a minor annoyance, nobody ran ad blockers.

Advertising then grew to become a major menace, as well as a security risk. THATS when everyone started running ad blockers. Cry me a river.

If people had not started fighting back, or just quit visiting the offending sites, this would have grown to where you would have to click a Next page button to read each and every sentence of an article. No thanks. No content is worth that.

Some reasonable compromise could exist. But for that to happen, all parties have to be reasonable. It should go without saying, but all parties also have to be sane. The ad people would not be happy even if they could require ads to be displayed on the inside of our eyelids. So I don't have a lot of sympathy.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[porges]

In this case, the readers are refusing to be customers at all.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[HiThere]

That's not reputable, that's "peer reviewed". Reputatable means that people who have enough power and influence to affect what large numbers of people hear approve of what you say. Sometimes they come to the same answer, but by far not always.

E.g., the New York Times generally supports a particular flavor of conservative political action. Things that it favors because of this get better treatment than things that it disapproves of. This is not an objective reporting, despite what their slogan suggests. ("fit to print" is not objective, but subjective.)

OTOH, I will admit that I've never been at the scene of a news event covered by the New York Times, and compared their coverage to what I observed. Perhaps they are more accurate than the "reputable" papers that I've seen coverage of stories where I knew what I saw. But in the times that I've been able to check, NONE of the major news media gave an even approximately fair writeup. Pictures were taken from carefully chosen angles, e.g., to get the most emotionally intense reaction. Sometimes several pictures of the same event were taken at slightly different angles and then presentes as if (not explicitly stated!) they were separate occurances. Etc. The news was highly processed to make it "more interesting". Other times they just refuse to cover a story, presumably for political reasons. And sometimes they give a story much more coverage than it "deserves" for political reasons. Most of the time, though it means processessing events to make them more "interesting" (which usually means more shocking).

N.B.: I cannot even imagine a way of avoiding the kinds of biases I've been mentioning. Not if you want to stay in business. But this doesn't make them trustworthy.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Agent0013]

That's what I was going to say. Serve the ads from your own servers. In fact, make it more like a sponsorship thing. Like the radio people that read the sponsors message rather than play the pre-recorded commercial. You bypass the ad-blockers, and you will vette each and every ad that is shown on your site. If you are allowing the blinking, noisy, annoying ads, then you deserve to lose visitors. By having your own company check each ad for acceptability and lack of malware, then you make sure your page stays acceptable to the visitors and they will keep visiting.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Cro Magnon]

However, if your tiny local business had a virus infecting their coffee the way some web advertisers install malware, I guarantee that you would never return. If they are blasting obnoxious noises inside their business the way audio ads hit your browser, you would likely not return either.

People will support you, if they like you. But, if you are obnoxious, you will not be liked.

In fact, awhile ago, my GF and I ate at a small pizza place. The food was very good, but they played background music very loudly. We didn't return.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[previewlounge]

this simile/metaphor could perhaps also relate to romantic realms. hmmm.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[yurtinus]

It really is too bad a few bad apples spoiled the bunch when it comes to web advertising. Text and even animated banners never bothered me, but then there was sound, flash, and all manner of crap. How many of you noticed in the dial-up days that it took longer to load the ads than the content you wanted to view? It only takes one ad intrusive enough to get us to install ABP or Flashblock.

It really is too bad, since I doubt any of us would care enough about the vast majority of ads to take that step. I know I haven't bothered to on my home computer since reinstalling the OS several months back, but once I come across "that one ad," it's game over for all of them.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[dzfoo]

Thanks for providing that point of view. It does not really challenge my point, but provides an insightful way of looking at it.

        Thanks,
          dZ.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[pnutjam]

It's like I took one of your books and stuck post-its on every page saying "your too ugly", "you smell bad", "you need bigger boobs", "that stuff your eating is crap", etc...

Tell me again why I care what someone who does that thinks?

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[pnutjam]

I am providing free content right now.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[X0563511]

I'm not going to feed the paywall either. So either way, they don't get any cash from me.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[X0563511]

Then you have the small population that actively hates any kind of advertising.

I have never responded positively to an advertisement. If I buy your product it was because I saw the actual product, or was told about it by someone I trust to know about those kind of things.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[hairyfeet]

Well I DO block ads from /. and I'll tell you why...the last 2 times i unblocked them, guess what the FIRST thing the site loaded was? Adobe Flash. I'm sorry but Adobe Flash is for content ONLY and even then it has to be first party and I have to trust you. While I think Adobe Flash is better than HTML V5 in just about every way lets be honest, the track record for Flash when it comes to security ain't great and I sure as hell ain't gonna trust ANY site to show me ads using Flash Player. I've seen too many infections caused by Flash ads for me to allow it on my system.

Now when I was using a Mozilla based browser I would just allow the image and text based ads to go while blocking any third party or flash ads but since I am no longer on a Moz based all I have is adblock and it just isn't that finely grained. If /. stops using flash for ads? Would have NO problem with unblocking but until then its just too much of a security risk.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Weezul]

Interesting, although surely you could continually update the site's in house ads so that AdBlcok failed.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Trogre]

And how are these sites going to pay for their servers and bandwidth? Fairy dust?

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[KingBenny]

mh yea, a bit of a code of conduct and restraint for marketsers might be in order but i have seen sites where the video's wouldnt even start when adblocker is up so i guess it must be possible to counter it
i have however no clue how or what and am not inclined to mention the site in question so my info might be
irrelevant

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[pixelpusher220]

Then explain the first bundle which didn't have the same hype?

And if it won't work for individual works...so what? Lots of business models don't work for individual works. It's why stores carry lots of different items...

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[pixelpusher220]

So you have hate Flash but have it installed? Whether content or ads, the vulnerabilities you claim to abhor are still there...

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Tim C]

I'm not so sure that their targetting is all that great - I keep getting dating ads, despite being "in a relationship", and Christian-centric ads despite being an atheist.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Snufu]

Since both Sun and Wind had to be elsewhere by sundown, they agreed to a time limit up front.

Round three scheduled for tomorrow...Rain permitting.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Crosshair84]

You're missing the point, the content isn't being served up from some malware server in Kazakhstan, the ads are. If you're visiting a trusted site, like newgrounds, the risks from flash are minimal. With flash ads from 3rd parties, who the hell knows where that ad is being served from. Yes flash has its problems, it also has its uses. Much like fire, Flash is very useful when properly controlled and dammed dangerous when it isn't. The websites and ad providers have screwed themselves and it is up to them to change.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[hairyfeet]

Thanks Crosshair, you nailed it right on the head. I have a half a dozen sites, not a site more, that I allow to show Flash content because 1.-Its ALL first party, 2.-They properly vet all first party content so I know each has been checked individually for malware, and 3.- they have a proven track record for not allowing dodgy content onto their sites. Newgrounds is one of those BTW.

But with flash ads NONE OF THOSE CONDITIONS applies in any way,1.- it is NOT first party, so I not only have to concern myself with the security of the site I'm at but which third party ad server they are using (which can change from day to day depending on who is paying better, thus making research worthless) 2.- It is NOT in any way vetted by the site I am at, most sign a contract which lets the ad company serve any ads they want and they aren't provided before being served so who knows what is coming next, 3.- There is not only NOT a history of security, its the opposite as I have pointed out the porn topsites of old had a better record for not serving malware than the current ad servers, again and again we see the largest source for PC infections? Ad servers, and a great chunk of those? Using Flash to call an attack vector, such as embedding a PDF or Word Doc and using Flash to serve it or using Flash to call a third party site through a hidden iFrame which then has a laundry list of vulnerabilities to hit you with when it loads, see my journal for how many of my customers using Firefox were hit with what I named the "Yahoo porn bug" by simply looking at flash porn from untrusted third parties. You miss one patch to one first or third party piece of software released in the last 6 months? They have you pwned.

So while I still say Flash is better than HTML V5 in every way, in support, in resource usage, in bandwidth, better than does NOT equal great in any way, shape or form and you'd have to be a fool to run flash ads from untrusted sources and I'm sorry but I have no desire to spend my days insuring the /. never changes ad servers and that the ad company has an unblemished record when it comes to flash. Hell even finding that kind of data out is like pulling teeth which is why third party ads frankly don't work, it lets everyone play "pass the buck" and blame the other guy for the infection, the buck never stops anywhere which is simply unacceptable for security purposes.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[hairyfeet]

Yeah the old folks and the lonely, which sadly in this day and age has a lot of crossover. Most of the younger folks I deal with just don't have enough hours in the day as it is for all they want to do, taking time out for ads they don't give a rat's ass about is not part of the equation. They figure "Hey I'll spend 20 minutes figuring how to block ads and will save several HOURS a year in bullshit" so they block, simple as that.

What pisses me off is as a retailer there is NO POINT in all this tracking except to be nosy assholes, this era is the age of niches and anybody with 2 functioning braincells can figure out how to target without knowing jack shit about the readers. Take Ars who asked nicely so I unblocked, now what kind of ad did I see on an article I was reading about the new GPU designs? Was it an ad for new or used GPUs? NOT EVEN CLOSE it was an ad for fucking BUSINESS SOFTWARE from IBM! WHAT THE FUCK, does ANYBODY believe that the demographic looking at the latest CONSUMER graphics cards are gonna be doing business for SaaS solutions from big blue?

And the truly sad part? I set up the netbox at the shop to block NOTHING when the whole stink of "targeted ads" came out, because I wanted to see if they actually worked, know what I found? I named their "new tech" as "eternally late software" or ELS because it is NEVER targeting what you WANT to buy, but what you bought as long as 2 years ago! I had been spending something like 3 months researching small SSDs for use as caching drives, did I get a single ad for SSD? Oh fuck no, they kept showing me ads for netbooks and ultrabooks even though I had ALREADY BOUGHT my EEE netbook nearly a year before and hadn't looked at a single page about netbooks since!

The whole thing is annoying, intrusive, puts you at greater risk of malware, and doesn't even offer you products you'd want to buy, so why would I not block them? The ONLY ONE I have seen "get it right" is fellow retailer Amazon, who use a simple "Hey if you like this people who bought this also bought that, would you like to buy that too?" that doesn't need to know jack shit other than which products usually sell together and ya know what? IT WORKS, it doesn't show me diapers when I'm looking at CPUs, doesn't try to sell me web hosting when I'm looking at RAM sticks, it shows me things that actually go together and ya know what? I've bought quite a few things thanks to them pointing out what works well together, I actually enjoy and look forward to the email ads they send me because it is strictly based on "You bought this and that works well with this" formula and makes fucking sense! Good Lord common sense really is a God damned superpower in this day and age from the looks of these ad companies!

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[hairyfeet]

The sad part is as a retailer I bet I could make you click on those ads, hell you would probably even enjoy those ads, how? COMMON FUCKING SENSE that is how! Let's say you are reading an article on GPUs, without knowing jack shit about you I would put ads that say "Hey are you looking for a new GPU? We have both new and refurb GPUs at good prices and you get a 5% discount for being a reader here, why don't you check out our selection and see if we have what you want?"

This is why Amazon is swimming in pools of money, because if you are looking at motherboards they ain't trying to sell you baby diapers! Instead its a VERY basic formula that we retailers have used since the dawn of sales "Hey you want this? Well people that buy this often buy that because they work well together, maybe you would like to buy that too?" and ya know what? I often DO buy that because it works well with this, if I am buying a DDR 3 board to replace a DDR 2 board and they offer a bundle deal on some DDR 3 sticks, why wouldn't I buy them together and save some money?

The reason everyone blocks ads now when they didn't before is the current system is BROKEN, they use third party ad servers in fuckuistan that will be happy to spread malware as long as the check clears, the ads have jack shit to do with what you are reading, and they are as obnoxious as a fat racist drunk screaming about Jews and have about as much to do with what you are actually reading about, IE none at all. So no shit people block them, they'd have to be stupid not to!

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[hairyfeet]

This is why the ONLY company that sells more than one niche, like say Newegg, I allow to send me emails is Amazon because at least THEY show common sense! Take the one I got today, it might as well have been worded "Hey we saw that you bought your mom some more of those trashy Patricia Briggs horror books, did you know she has a new one coming out?" because guess what, I DID buy my mom some more of those trashy Patricia Briggs horror books for her BDay and since those things are like the old "penny dreadfuls" in that they are always some 10-20 book serial there are always new books coming out in the series, so ya know what? I bought the book, mom will have her mail handed to her next week and find another trashy horror book which I'm sure she'll love.

It just amazes me how these companies can have so much info and can't even get close to the target, with Amazon I have NEVER gotten an email that wasn't about 1.-Music gear, 2.-PC gear, 3.-Cheesy horror books, 4.- Video games. Why? Because that is what I fricking buy from Amazon! Geez how stupid can these companies be, if I NEVER click on an ad for a hotel chain why in the fuck do you keep giving me ads for hotel chains? They are either lazy as hell or dumb as a stump, one of the two because obviously all that money they spent on targeting went straight down the shitter.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[hairyfeet]

I think you are wrong, and here is why: Most of that shareware you seem to be railing against? Frankly was a hell of a lot more like the Humble Bundles than it was commercial software which FYI there were high dollar software that you couldn't pass around legally then too, most of the database software for an example.

Most of those shareware titles gave you several levels of the game so you could "try before you buy" to make sure it ran well on your system and you liked it, and the money? Was used to make more games. In a way it was like Kickstarter only you actually got something for your money up front.

Sadly the reason you don't see shareware anymore is that the corps have bought so many laws frankly I doubt shareware would survive the legal minefield that is today's software landscape. I should know as i tried to contact the makers of all those old shareware titles, I wanted to build with a software programmer friend an easy to use platform to run those old titles on a modern OS and quickly found out it was a total legal quagmire, with many pieces in limbo because nobody knows who the hell owns the rights to it (so called abandonware which covers a LARGE part of the software made before Windows 95) and the ones that do own the rights are either scared of being sued by somebody, don't even know where the complete code is anymore, or think that one day it'll be able to turn it into an iPhone game for big bucks.

But as somebody who lived through those years frankly I think you are looking at them through rose colored glasses, just look at how the devs of KDE and Gnome as well as those in charge of the audio subsystem in Linux all gave the "community" a Goatse when it came to KDE 4, GnomeShell, and Pulse, none of which the community actually wanted. If there was a REAL community then those at the bottom would have a say it what goes on, IRL look up "Ulrich Drepper asshole" to see how the "community" actually IS behind the scenes. What you have is some devs with massive egos setting edicts on high and unless you can get enough programmers with enough skills to actually fork the entire thing AWAY from its creator (which ironically happened to RMS, both Emacs and GCC he "blessed" but are actually forks to take him out of the picture) then you are screwed, you have no say in anything.

At least with pay software if enough people hate the software or a company's policies they can force them to change or go under, see how EA is on the selling block and Activision is undergoing restructuring for examples. Hell if MSFT doesn't come out with an OS that doesn't assault their customers they may end up the same, with Apple and Google taking their customers away from them.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[Registered Coward v2]

However, free is not sustainable for most sites and users show a distinct disinclination to pay for content.

That is not necessarily true. Users show a distinct disinclination to pay for crappy or mediocre content. Since the birth of capitalism, people have paid for stuff. Everybody buys stuff.

The problem is that some people believe that the Internet changed all that, as if it was some sort of magical entity that made content free.

The WWW started with all sorts of free content, because it was provided by enthusiasts and academics, who didn't mind giving it away for free.

I certainly agree here - Sturgeon's revelation is still relevant; although it's more like 99.9% on the internet. The problem is people have gotten so conditioned to free that it's hard to convert them to pay; even if they are interested in the content. Look at /. - paywalled articles immediately get a request to for a way around the paywall and are often reposted word for word. Now, a reasonable argument is they are not worth what is asked; but then people still don't want to simply not read them - they want them for free.

The problem with ads are they often are obtrusive; but more importantly they don't seem to work very well. Their value will decrease to the point that you simply won't be able to serve enough to make it worthwhile. I don't think the current model is sustainable and ad-blockers aren't going away.

One model I've seen work is a sports site I frequent. They have small, narrowly targeted ads and go out of their way to avoid bad ones. they also ask for donations about 2x per year and get enough to keep running and hire and pay staff. The big thing is they actually have decent content and a robust discussion board so people want to help out to keep the site around.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[hairyfeet]

See Crosshair's answer and my reply, I would only add that I have NEVER seen an infection come from one of the handful of first party sites that I allow to serve flash content. Hell I even loaded up a sandbox and spent a couple of weeks searching to find a free pornsite (myfreepaysite if you care to know) because I had male customers that kept getting infected searching for free porn but since I found the above site I haven't seen ANY infections from those customers that listened to me and switched.

Now if you want to see WHY I refuse to allow Flash for ads just look at my journal and my description of the "Yahoo porn bug" which used Flash to send spam to a Yahoo users address book. To this day I'll still get one or two spam emails a week from former customers that didn't heed my warning and get hit by the porn bug. The journal has the full description but without Flash, which I still argue is better than HTML V5 in every way? They wouldn't be sending out spam.

But better than does not mean perfect, or even great, I mean if I slap you its better than me shooting you in the crotch but I wouldn't call either something to look forward too, but sadly we simply haven't come up with a tech that can do what Flash does. For videos and games its low resource, low overhead, can run on even 10 year old hardware, what it does it does well but security is NOT one of those things which is why like Crosshair said you have to treat it like fire, good when controlled and a danger when not. Unfortunately the third party ad companies have shown repeatedly they have NO respect for the dangers of flash and will serve just about any flash video as long as the check clears. As long as that is the case i'll continue to block sites that use third party flash for ads (which includes Slashdot) because its just common sense.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[aurizon]

Get them down, and kick them while they are down to make sure they stay down. I agree with you - scorched earth.
BUT, we have an ecology - we get free space, and for that we must tolerate ads whose money we use to pay for what we want.
We need a set of rules that will allow ads, that will not allow any of these objectionable practices.
Full up ad block is our bully, and the enemy gets it's own bully = an arms race.

How do we get a liveable peace?

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[aurizon]

I want ads that help me, like XVZ Inc advises that a meter maid will find your car with an expired meter in 10 minutes, so I can top up the meter. If we had e-meters, I could tag them when I parked and drop in 25 cents every few minutes, as needed by me knowing when I would leave.

Re: It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[xizdaqrian]

Perfectly stated.

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[crutchy]

web 2.0 was about using the internet to make money

web 3.0 is the new web created by those who are fed up with the web 2.0 bullshit and now use p2p and torrent clients to avoid web 2.0

Re:It's a flawed way to keep a site up.

[phorm]

huge revenues with relatively few advertisements

It started out that way, mainly because the money was in the data willingly supplied by users (and shared with "marketing" companies), rather than the in-line advertising.

Now however, it's getting to be a pretty nasty ad-fest as well, with ads sneaking in with your friends comments, and the constantly "Name an animal that doesn't have a letter "a" in the same" bullshit.

I used to block ads

[lesincompetent]

Then i realized exactly that without ads 3/4 of the internet would not exist. Now i simply manually block ads with my hosts file only when they are particularly annoying (autoplaying videos? Whose great idea was it?).

Re:I used to block ads

[Flammon]

Ads is a very expensive way to pay for content. Your cost of living is 9% to 12% higher because of Marketing. I think that if we took the money spent on ads and gave it to content creators instead, we would have more and better quality content. As an added bonus, no annoying ads that slow everything down.

Re:I used to block ads

[spxZA]

What you are describing is a website behind a paywall. We don't all want that.

Re:I used to block ads

[Anonymous Coward]

The Internet was ticking along very nicely before it was plagued with ads. If a few sites die, so what, they're only glorified bloggers and aggregations replication stuff from elsewhere under the guise of "reporting".

If the adverts weren't so obnoxious and stealing bandwidth, people wouldn't worry too much about them. Fix the ads, or shut up shop.

Re:I used to block ads

[Bert64]

I used to only block particularly obnoxious ads (those with sound mostly, or any form of popup that disrupts what your doing)... But then i found there were simply too many obnoxious ads that it was easier to block them all.
I never had a problem with simple banners or text ads, and would never have considered blocking them.

What i found particularly offensive was video ads for movies that started automatically playing (thus distracting me with the noise and wasting a substantial amount of bandwidth), and which were for movies that i couldn't even legally see in my location!

Incidentally advertisers generally pay per click not per view, and those who block ads are generally those who would never have clicked on them in the first place.

Re:I used to block ads

[Anonymous Coward]

What you are describing is a website behind a paywall. We don't all want that.

We don't all want ads either. Why do the ones who want ads instead of paywalls get to dictate the rules?

Re:I used to block ads

[Let's All Be Chinese]

Given that at least that much is crap, and a large chunk consists of stuff set up for no other purpose than to lure in ad revenue, shrinkage here may not be a bad thing.

At the very least it might get advertisers and those depending on them for revenue finally thinking about how to reach people. Traditionally it's by snatching your attention in the most annoying way possible because any exposure is good advertising, right?

And then you get autoplaying videos, or animated gifs, blinking tags, flashing flash, or whatever else they'll think up next. In short, "dancing rodents", in advertising flavour.

I block things when they annoy me and when I do I block everything on the page. That's using an ad-blocker, though without the prefab lists, I just grow my own. So if advertisers want their advertisements to stay visible, well, they better make sure the advertisements do not annoy me.

Annoying includes posing as real content only turning out to be vapid and snickering, having succeeded at wasting my time (adwords, say). Or as simple as burning too many cycles with js, ajax, whatever, especially when the real content could've been served up js-free. "Pingers" that track my eyeballing the site and phoning home every second get booted with prejudice.

Advertisers need to re-think, since "fighting" the audience for their attention has become a lot less useful because the audience can fight back, and rightfully so. For am I the product, or a "consumer" with no other rights than to "consume"? I don't think so.

The key to good business is to add value, and merely screaming loudest you're the best, really, is not adding value. Marketing needs to grow up.

Re:I used to block ads

[theduk3]

Where do your 9-12 % come from? Link please

Re:I used to block ads

[Rockoon]

This is the way I am looking at it:

For many sites, there is a significant circle-jerk between the users and the advertising. The site would not exist without the advertising paying for it, AND the site also would not exist if the users werent generating content for the site. You are using an example of this right now, good old slashdot.

In those cases, if a significant number of users turn to ad blocking then eventually they cut their own throats and the site will go away. Many forums and services on the internet are these circle-jerks.

The thing about advertising is that its essentially a pay-per-view model, a model that is ultimately one of the fairest models that could be crafted. Subscription models tend to trend toward a reduction of alternatives, towards market consolidation, and the more casual a user you are the more you end up paying per view.

Anyways, if this story is indeed about a site that has ended up with 50% of its users running ad blockers then there is a pretty good chance that the particular advertising they were doing was particularly annoying (possibly lots of malware delivered too.)

Re:I used to block ads

[JustOK]

By nicely you mean very little content compared to today. By nicely you mean not able to make money.
It's the obnoxious, intrusive and privacy-stealing ads that are the problem.

Re:I used to block ads

[Psicopatico]

And I'll just keep on blocking ads (not that I'm an user of the website in TFS).

Shiny crowded amazing website will go under?
Well I've lived comfortably for decades without it, I think I can continue for a couple more.

Re:I used to block ads

[Mike Frett]

Exactly. It was working just fine, and the pages were not slow and bulky. And when ads did appear, they were minimal and not intrusive. People say we should just let the banks fail and reboot, I think we should let websites whose pages are slow and bulky and have top bottom and sides filled with ads, just let them fail.

User created content use to be king, now it's corporate garbage with shill reviews and web browsers that can't cope with all the shitty code and slowness. And when you searched from a Search engine, you actually found relevant results and not auto generated trash.

This virtual world is in dire need of a reboot.

Re:I used to block ads

[houghi]

As long as you have another way of creating revenue, this is an option.
However very often ads are the only way of creating revenue. Just like with tv, the ads is what it is about and the shows are there so we watch the ads.
Websites are no different. The articles are just an excuse to make you watch the ads.

Re:I used to block ads

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't want ads , we just don't want to pay

ads are just something you have to put up with - you don't even have to buy any product based on those ads, especially when those ads are irrelevant [eg "Refi your home mortgage" (you live in your parents basement) ;" Cheap v1@gra" (like most slashdotters you don't get any sex anyway) ]

Re:I used to block ads

[Type44Q]

Your cost of living is 9% to 12% higher because of Marketing. I think that if we took the money spent on ads and gave it to content creators instead, we would have more and better quality content.

Not to mention all the marketing and advertising people starving to death (which surely solves a few additional problems). :)

Re:I used to block ads

[Anonymous Coward]

Your cost of living is 9% to 12% higher because of Marketing

Link please or mods please do NOT mark +1 Insightful.

SO fucking lazy. 20 seconds on Google gives this as an example, and a whole shitload more:
http://www.legalzoom.com/business-management/promoting-your-business/cost-marketing-what-is
"The average allocation usually ranges between 9-12% of the annual budget,"

The poster probably didn't include a link because this is business management 101.

Re:I used to block ads

[Alumoi]

By nicely you mean very little content compared to today.

I beg to differ. Today there is very little content. Only movies, pics and a shitload of 'professional' opinions from self-appointed independent/expert/investigator/journalist.... assholes whose only purpose is throwing more ads in your face.

Re:I used to block ads

[BasilBrush]

However very often ads are the only way of creating revenue. Just like with tv, the ads is what it is about and the shows are there so we watch the ads.

In Britain the BBC doesn't show advertising. They are funded by an annual fee that TV users pay. 145UKP (216USD). And that gets more than just the lack of advert breaks. It also gets programmes that the commercial channels don't find profitable to make, such as period dramas, and science programs.

Re:I used to block ads

[TubeSteak]

Anyways, if this story is indeed about a site that has ended up with 50% of its users running ad blockers then there is a pretty good chance that the particular advertising they were doing was particularly annoying (possibly lots of malware delivered too.)

Why didn't you say up front that you had not read the fine article?

Re:I used to block ads

[wisnoskij]

First off your percentages are ridiculous. I assume you mean if adds stopped today, we would do 9-12 percent less buying today on average.

Second, you are making the (wrong in my opinion) assumption that money can buy you quality and quantity content.

Re:I used to block ads

[BrokenHalo]

Not to mention all the marketing and advertising people starving to death

...which is cheaper than sending them to Golgafringcham. :)

Re:I used to block ads

[Anonymous Coward]

>>> Then i realized exactly that without ads 3/4 of the internet would not exist

and thats a bad thing? Id say 3/4 isnt enough, we need to cut more crap really. i remember the good old days, when there was NO ADDS!! yes, imagine that. so i say fuck em too :p

Re:I used to block ads

[Anonymous Coward]

Also annoying are the ones that try to trick you into clicking on the ads.

5 different download buttons. And the correct one isn't a button, it's just an 8-point hyperlink.

Re:I used to block ads

[DaveV1.0]

DO me a favor. Go out, start a business, don't advertise, let us know how long you stay in business.

Re:I used to block ads

[wisnoskij]

And the 1/4 that remained would be porn sites that cost money to enter, and stores/businesses whose entire site is an ad for their company.

Re:I used to block ads

[abirdman]

Thank you for proving definitively that my experience has been wrong for all these years. I never got to enjoy that online world of the past, blessed with all that lovely non-shitty and bloat-free "user created content," when browsers could cope with whatever was posted, and search engines only returned relevant results. For so long, my experience was just the opposite. It's a relief to finally realize I was living in an alternate universe.

Re:I used to block ads

[Teun]

Indeed.

Here's an example from The Netherlands, the cost for commercials per car per brand: http://www.rtl.nl/components/financien/rtlz/2011/weken_2011/07/0218_1115_VW_geeft_per_auto_minst_aan_reclame_uit.xml

No doubt similar happens in other developed countries, look at the top five and cry for the savings you could have had:
Infiniti € 8.293
Dodge € 3.348
Lexus € 3.337
Lancia € 3.218
Jaguar € 2.788

Re:I used to block ads

[John Bokma]

I run a simple blog with modest text only AdSense and last time I checked 50+% of the visitors do block ads. There was a time I made 700+ USD/month with it. It's now closer to 100 USD, also because I just can't afford to put much time in it (and hence visitors dropped, a lot).

Re:I used to block ads

[thunderclap]

which is why their olympic commentarty was so much better and why they screamed horribly when it was posted for free on the net. I was willing to pay for the stream I found by going to the site (i have a functional British address) but that amount was just too much for 3 weeks.

Re:I used to block ads

[Teun]

No, these are real numbers that you can easily find via some googling.
There would be more disposable income and manufacturing (yes also in China) and services would get a boost.

Re:I used to block ads

[wvmarle]

And that same marketing help you to get information about competing products, which in turn means they have to keep their prices to a minimum. So that that this 9-12% fo the cost of living is related to marketing, doesn't mean your cost of living would be 9-12% lower without any marketing. It might even be higher because it's so much easier for shops to mark up prices, as you have such a hard time comparing prices and knowing what's out there to begin with.

Re:I used to block ads

[Threni]

What some sites do is to pop-up annoying reminders that I'm using ad-blocking sofrware. Uh..I know. Some of them even insist you turn it off. I can't be bothered - I'll go elsewhere. I can't imagine many people who do poke around in the menu and turn them off subsequently pay any attention to, or bother to click on, the ads.

I've been on the internet since 1996 or so, and I've never, ever clicked on an advert (other than by accident) and I never will, and I'll always use ad-blocking software (along with no-script, grease-monkey etc) so that I get the experience I want. It's like recording live tv so you can skip the ads; they're getting more and more obtrusive, and load, and the quality of TV commercials is just embarrassing. If this or that site is worried about the money side of things then they need to see how the successful sites are running. Or perhaps there's just no demand for internetgamingsite #10823724?

Re:I used to block ads

[Teun]

Duh!

Advertisers pay a LOT more per page in a fancy glossy than in your local rag even though it gets at least as many eyes.
These advertisers know their public and where to find them, the same is possible for on-line ads.

Right now it's in many cases just a matter of wildly shooting and hoping the odd duck falls at your feet.

Re:I used to block ads

[Runaway1956]

How many sites are you willing to pay a penny per view? Or even a tenth of a penny per view? How about a hundredth of a penny per view?

Seriously, tally them up for yourself. There's no more advertising, and the sites all use paywalls. Start counting those that you will continue to visit, and what price you're willing to pay. Are there any sites that you're willing to pay ten cents per view? How about a dollar?

If/when microtransactions are made workable, I might visit some sites that I visit now, but there are others that I'll just never load again. There are sites that should be paying ME for visiting. They don't, so I don't.

Anyway - I doubt that 3/4 of the web will disappear. .gov will remain, .edu will remain, game sites that see a profit will remain. Many other sites have their loyal followings who will willingly pay microtransactions to stay with the site. Other sites are paid out of pocket by the owners, and have little if any advertising on their pages.

Yeah, some of the web would disappear - but no big loss.

The biggest changes would be apparent in the news media's sites. And, many of them can just dry up and blow away. I'm not paying twenty dollars per year for access to ANY of their sites. Nor ten dollars. I might pay microtransactions that total up to a dollar in a month's time, but it's not likely. I'll find my news elsewhere.

Re:I used to block ads

[drinkypoo]

In those cases, if a significant number of users turn to ad blocking then eventually they cut their own throats and the site will go away. Many forums and services on the internet are these circle-jerks.

Slashdot actually offered me the option to block ads since I'm such a good user or whatever. But even if you turn off all the slashboxes the column still stays there, or at least it did last I checked. So I use a slashbox column hider and leave ads on, because somehow the hider breaks if I disable ALL the slashboxes. The mind reels.

Re:I used to block ads

[Zumbs]

I cannot answer for GP, but in Denmark this article (Danish, sorry) state that the super market chains use approximately 210 million Euro per year on dead-tree advertising alone (that is 40 Euro per Dane per year). On top of that, producers spend 600 million Euro per year to subsidize dead-tree advertising (some 115 Euro per year). For a family of four, that's an extra cost of 620 Euro per year for dead-tree advertising on goods from super markets alone. Add to that TV commercials and internet commercials. About 5 years ago, there was a survey (can't find a link) that stated that approximately 25% of what Danes paid for groceries were used to pay for advertising.

Re:I used to block ads

[Seumas]

Sorry, I have seen what the internet looks like without an adblocker and it's total shit. It's like having Times Square, Hong Kong, or Vegas at night all shoved in your eyeballs when you're just trying to read that tiny two inch wide square of actual content in the middle of it.

If you want some money and your content is worth it, give me an option to pay for it. I am a subscriber to GiantBomb.com (another gamesite), because I like their content and because I can then block their ads and feel good about it. (By the way, their subscriptions are $50/yr -- and I'm paid-up three years in advance). I chip in to a nice handful of websites who offer the option. It's a better bargain than having ads shoved in my face every second of the day (which might be fine for today's ADHD children that know no other world, but not for me).

Further, I remember a time when the internet wasn't all about a bunch of commercial enterprises trying to weasel every last buck from every inch of "real estate". Believe it or not, there used to be a period in which people made pretty awesome content. For free. Because they were interested in it. There was a time when every mommy-blogger with four readers a month didn't plaster her shitty web pages with endless Goodle AdSense ads or other crap, just to make seven cents per year.

If you can't afford to give your content away (because it's what you do for a living), then it should presumably be worth charging for. Even just a tiny bit. If you are focusing on making your way by shoving advertising in your audience's face, then it probably means most of your content is unoriginal copy and paste crap that is on every other website out there and as a result, of course you're having a hard time monetizing it. Even by way of advertising, because you're banking on your audience being either too stupid to adblock or too naive to give a shit that every inch of everything they consume every second of every day is just awash in stupid marketing. Further, what is the point of advertising to an audience that clearly doesn't want advertising? Do you seriously think that these people using adblock are going to click on your advertisements and go give those companies business? Of course not -- so the only thing you are even remotely risking losing is the occasional accidental click from someone who means to click on a headline and clicks on your shitty animated Halo 4 ad.

Ultimately, the question a lot of places like this are asking is how do we compete with free, when free is often as good or even better than what we're charging for (directly or with ads).

Perhaps the answer is -- you don't. If you offer something both valuable and unique, people would pay for it. Otherwise, all you can do is throw up ads and play the numbers with link-bait. An audience will just as likely move somewhere else if you are so swarmed in ads and, because your content isn't valuable enough to charge for, that probably means there is somewhere else these people can go. They aren't trapped between your content and no content. They -- your audience -- have all the options in the world. You're one who is trapped.

Your content is worth what it is worth and throwing ads up on it doesn't make it more valuable.

Re:I used to block ads

[Seumas]

As someone who built and maintained a community with 100k users for over a dozen years and did so without charging a dime for the significant services it offered nor plastered it with ads, my view is that people seeking to make money on the internet with advertising and various SEO bullshit are on-par with people who try to get rich with snail-mail chain-letter schemes.

I pay for a lot of content online. I hate advertising. If the threat is that all the commercial enterprises are going to vanish from the internet and we're going to end up back in a time when the internet was for enthusiasts generating and trading information and content among each other without having to monetize absolutely every fucking page load, then by all means -- I'm on board.

Re:I used to block ads

[Myopic]

This company did it quite explicitly starting fifty-one years ago. There is a good chance you even have their product in your home right now. Is more than half a century long enough for you? Maybe it isn't. I always, always seek out that brand specifically because of their no-ad pledge.

Re:I used to block ads

[Mr. Slippery]

And that same marketing help you to get information about competing products,

Advertising is disinformation.

You sound like you must work in the field. Please follow Bill Hicks's advice. Thank you, have a nice day.

Re:I used to block ads

[Bogtha]

He's not describing a paywall at all. Just because you can't think of any way to give money to content creators without a paywall, it doesn't mean the two things are synonymous. Look into micropatronage and the street performer protocol, for example.

Re:I used to block ads

[drolli]

I block intrusive ads. I have nothing agains a ad on the border, and i like if its well targeted. However if some site hovers some shit over the content or turns on the sound, bad.

Re:I used to block ads

[Myopic]

When I'm on a website to see a video, and I click on the video to watch it, if anything other than the video starts playing (I mean, if an advert starts playing) I think "Oh, huh, this website has some kind of bug in their system which causes the wrong video to play." I don't use buggy services, so I just go away from that website. Close the browser tab and leave, because the site reneged on the implicit promise of the hyperlink: click here to watch a video, but then the video doesn't play.

Re:I used to block ads

[CaptainLard]

Your cost of living is 9% to 12% higher because of Marketing.

What about marketing having got the word out on a product to a vast population allowing whatever business to expand and take advantage of economies of scale to the point where you can buy a 23" LED monitor for under $150? Wow, I can't believe I just tried to defend advertisers. I realize that when you pay for the name on something, you're paying for the marketing so yeah, costs are higher for that brand. But there is often a generic version of the same thing for half as much that wouldn't exist without the name brand sitting next to in the grocery store. I guess my point is, its not all bad (even in advertising).

Re:I used to block ads

[squiggleslash]

FWIW, you're wrong. Products need to be marketed otherwise we'd only hear about a small percentage of them and never buy anything that wasn't discovered and hyped by the media or something we'd heard of by the relatively slow and conservative word-of-mouth route. But let's put that aside for a moment:

There's no easy mechanism to easily support sites by using micropayments or anything similar.

Where ads differ from other means is that they're entirely passive. I don't have to set anything up to support an ad-funded website that I frequent.

And I'll add my voice to those pointing out that the problem here is not the principle but the ads themselves. I have no objection to websites putting static images and text around the content. But I flirt with ad blockers from time to time because of websites that insist on playing video (and worse, audio), that pop-up boxes in front of the content that you'd just started reading, and so on and so forth. Twitter has recently adopted the most obnoxious ad system I've ever seen, actually inserting the ads in the content, making them appear just like other tweets, so you're suddenly hit by a sales pitch in the middle of trying to follow your timeline.

All of these are obnoxious, and as long as advertisers seek to differentiate their ads from others by being as obnoxious as possible, and as long as content providers refuse to rein them in, the ad block war will continue.

What I'd like to see is that ad sellers change tactics and start to see themselves as funders of websites, rather than bullhorns for people trying to sell crap. If Google, Amazon, et al would allow people to pay to opt out of advertising, distributing the cash to the websites they visit instead, I'd be much happier.

Re:I used to block ads

[Myopic]

1/100th of a penny per page? All the websites. At that rate I'd owe a couple pennies a day, well worth it.

1/10th? 99% of the websites. 1 penny? It would start to matter what a "page" constituted, but still most of the websites, say 95%. At this rate I could owe as much as a dollar or two per day.

I dream of that kind of internet not because I think it would be a higher quality internet but because it would evince a value system amongst internet users which I think is a superior value system to the one we have today. That's the same reason I think it is mostly an impossible hypothetical situation.

That said, I do think it's surprising that nobody has made microtransactions work. Facebook or Google or one of the other single-signon websites have the obvious opportunity to do it. Especially Google which already has the advertising partnerships in place with so many websites, you can easily imagine a Pay For Ad-Free system where websites refuse to load if you block ads (annoying but fair), and you can simply pay to see the site.

Re:I used to block ads

[Anonymous Coward]

So I went to their website. It's an ad for their product.

Re:I used to block ads

[Anonymous Coward]

This company did it quite explicitly starting fifty-one years ago. There is a good chance you even have their product in your home right now. Is more than half a century long enough for you? Maybe it isn't. I always, always seek out that brand specifically because of their no-ad pledge.

not to be pedantic here, but noscript stopping "google-analytics.com" on their website begs to differ ...

Re:I used to block ads

[PlusFiveTroll]

Until google and others just use heavily obfuscated and self modifying javascript specifically to defeat such features.

Then they just get totally blocked. Mutually Assured Destruction is not a game you want to play if you want to make money on the internet.

Re:I used to block ads

[trylak]

I get pretty frequently a whole pile of advertisements in my mailbox. At my apartment complex there is a big trash can by the mailboxes where everyone deposits those straight out of the mailbox. I don't know how much that costs that get passed on, but it is certainly a lot of dead trees too.

Re:I used to block ads

[Anonymous Coward]

That website is in itself an ad.

Re:I used to block ads

[maztuhblastah]

By nicely you mean very little content compared to today. By nicely you mean not able to make money.
It's the obnoxious, intrusive and privacy-stealing ads that are the problem.

That's part of the problem yes.

The other part of the problem is that people such as yourself see "not able to make money" as part of the "problem" with the pre-hyper-commercialized web.

Not everything needs to be squeezed until it makes a buck, but as long as people keep seeing everything in the world with fucking dollar signs in their eyes the problem will continue.

Was part of the "problem" with gas handle pumps that they didn't have space for another ad? 'cause we solved that problem.

How about airliner tray tables? They couldn't make money, but we sure addressed that one.

And long stretches of road with greenery and shit visible? The issue there was it just wasn't making money! But don't worry, we fixed it.

Advertising is societal corrosion. It eats away at our experiences, it reshapes our thoughts, it homogenizes and neuters our culture, and it's all because people such as yourself see "not making any money" as an inherent problem with all sorts of aspects of our lives.

Re:I used to block ads

[0123456]

By nicely you mean very little content compared to today.

Yes. By nicely we mean that when we did a web search we got actual useful information rather than having to hunt through hundreds of web sites which only exist in order to bring in advertising income when people click on them.

I've never, ever bought anything from a web ad, so advertisers who try to push them to me are just wasting money. And given the amount of malware spread from ad sites, not blocking them is a huge security liability.

Re:I used to block ads

[GrumpySteen]

Never heard of them, but a Google search shows a whole list of adword ads placed by Walmart and other retailers who placed ads for the product. Also, the company was bought by Sun & Skin Care Research LLC who also own theOcean Potion, Bullfrog and Parrot Head brands and has no problem with advertising.

But hey... at least you can pretend you're supporting some highly ethical company with your consumer choices, right?

Re:I used to block ads

[noh8rz10]

I'm trying to process this... you're saying that the manufacturer pays 3 euros per car on advertising. Yes? but then they make $20,000 euros per car when they sell it! sounds like a brilliant investment in advertising!

Re:I used to block ads

[UnknownSoldier]

> without ads 3/4 of the internet would not exist.

And nothing of value was lost.

IF a company serving ads wants to pay for _MY_ bandwidth costs then I have no problem with them serving ads. Until then, they can fuck off with their cross-hosts Flash, Java, and Javascript ads that don't respect my eyes and ears.

Blocking ads makes loading their website FASTER so I can tell if the CONTENT _and_ COMMUNITY is worth paying for (or not.)

--
Only cowards use censorship.

Re:I used to block ads

[Archangel Michael]

In many types of markets, if you don't advertise, you go out of business, even if your prices are less than you competitors. The simple fact, that IF you take away ALL adverts, chances of you being able to make a "name" for yourself(product) is none. Your chances of expanding your business is none. The chances of failure is all but assured.

And then there is the scale of things. IF you sell one widget at $10 per time period, and that is all you will ever sell on "word of mouth" advertizing, and you make $1 on that widget, you've made $1. However, if you mark the price up $1 and now sell three, you're $1 better off than not marking the price up, and selling less. Now, because you sell three, your cost to develop the widget is spread across three widgets lowering that cost on each widget, earning you another $1. And because you have to have a new process, that can make three, you become more efficient and earn another $1 across the three. Now if you conntinue, you can lower the price to $10, and still earn more, even while spending on advertizing.

Advertizing is about breaking down the economies of scale barrier, as much as anything. While my example is overly simplistic, and illustrative only, it does give the reason why advertizing is important, and shouldn't be studied in a vacuum. The problem with overly simplistic examples, like yours, is that they don't cover the reasons people need and should be advertizing.

Lastly, if your competitors are advertizing and you're not, you're going to be out of business, and rather quickly. They will get your business, and make more money. My view, advertizing, if done right, is at best a necessary evil, it allows new products to gain markets they wouldn't normally get. Let say, you're on Sprint, AT&T or Verizon, and T-Mobile suddenly stopped advertizing, and lowered their prices by $5/ mo (15%), but didn't tell anyone. Do you think they would succeed in making you switch (all other things equal)?? The others are advertizing all the newest coolest phones, and T-Mobile isn't saying a word, how do you know what phones T-Mo has, their prices or whatnot?

Yes, there are rare exceptions to this (see Apple iPad for example) where a product takes off better than wildest dreams could hope for, and everyone involved are shocked.

Re:I used to block ads

[sootman]

> It's the obnoxious, intrusive and privacy-stealing
> ads that are the problem.

Which is to say, most of them. :-)

My rationale for blocking ads: Most ads come from ad networks. These networks can be hacked to serve malicious ads (or maybe people just pay for malicious ads and they don't get caught by QC -- don't know, don't care.) The fucking New York Times fell victim to this so it's not a minor problem. I block ads as a security measure.

Re:I used to block ads

[Zumbs]

Do you think that money just vanishes into thin air?

Where did I suggest that? For the record, I know full well that the money spent on advertising funds an entire industry of professional manipulators, printers, layouters, transport workers etc.

I know that Slashdot (and in particular the European contingent) isn't exactly a bastion of economic genius, but how exactly do you think jobs come from in the first place?

Huh? Are you suggesting that all jobs come from advertising? Or just the jobs in the super markets? Or did you accidentally reply to this post instead of another one?

Re:I used to block ads

[nabsltd]

And that same marketing help you to get information about competing products

All you need to learn about "competing products" is simple spec sheets. I wouldn't buy something like a car using just that data, but it would allow me to narrow my focus to the ones that fit my needs. But, I would buy a hard drive or a bag of potato chips that way. In both these cases, other user reviews would be enough to let me know if the relatively small cost was worth the "risk" of the item not being acceptable.

This is one of the largest problems with advertising, where small ticket items (candy bars, soda, etc.) shouldn't be advertised at all after they have been established for a while. At that point, the cost of entry is so low and enough user reviews exist that the marginal buyers cost a fortune compared to the expected profit. I can somewhat understand big ticket items having more advertising, but it's still far too much per marginal user. Just like politics, where people might never vote outside their party, there is a percentage of people who will never purchase certain brands of big-ticket items, and no advertising will change that. Likewise, some people will never buy anything but one brand. You mostly see this with cars, but appliances and tools are other areas where this sort of brand loyalty/hatred arise.

Re:I used to block ads

[Zumbs]

In Denmark it is possible to say no to getting advertisements in your mailbox. I think some 25% of Danish households (including my own) use that option. And, yeah, if do your groceries at a super market that does advertising (and who does not?), you pay for it, even if you do not get them.

Re:I used to block ads

[Zumbs]

The problem with overly simplistic examples, like yours, is that they don't cover the reasons people need and should be advertizing.

GP asked if there was any documentation on how much advertising costs the consumer. I gave numbers for super markets in Denmark. I intentionally did not consider if I thought that the price was reasonable or not, just like you did not consider that advertizing is in essence large scale manipulation of the citizens, funded by the very same citizens.

Re:I used to block ads

[Spiridios]

I used to only block particularly obnoxious ads (those with sound mostly, or any form of popup that disrupts what your doing)... But then i found there were simply too many obnoxious ads that it was easier to block them all. I never had a problem with simple banners or text ads, and would never have considered blocking them.

I'm in a similar boat, but my tipping point for moving to a block list was malware. Even the mighty double-click, who should have been big enough to actually screen their ads, has served up malware on more than one occasion. I'm all for a simple way for sites to make money, but if they're asking me to do the equivalent of walking through a dark alley filled with shady characters, I'll pass.

Re:I used to block ads

[Snufu]

The internet is a public utility like phone, water, and electricity. Its inception was funded by federal research. Its original design and purpose was to facilitate communication between universities and later between the public at large.

The internet was not created by private venture. Businesses have no inherent right to make money off it or to steal bandwidth that other people paid for to push unrequested ads around.

Re:I used to block ads

[spasm]

So what's that website if not an ad?

Re:I used to block ads

[Luckyo]

The entire point of the article is that you by no means have to put up with them. Which is exactly what people are doing, and what is bothering the site owner.

Re:I used to block ads

[sfm]

I would like to see a model similar to YouTube. It allows for you to skip advertising after watching the first 5 seconds. I will skip ads that do not apply, but generally watch interesting ads at least once. For videos that do not allow skipping, its more time efficient to flip to a different window while the ad plays.

Not sure how to translate this model to popup style ads.

Re:I used to block ads

[Stormy Dragon]

If the threat is that all the commercial enterprises are going to vanish from the internet and we're going to end up back in a time when the internet was for enthusiasts generating and trading information and content among each other without having to monetize absolutely every fucking page load, then by all means -- I'm on board.

Or you will be on board until you can't find a full service ISP anymore because with only the enthusiasts on board, there's not enough of a market for open internet to keep broadband providers. Everyone who isn't attached to a university or willing to shell out hundreds of dollars a month is gonna get forced back into an AOL style walled garden were the provider can collect payment up front and then divy it out to the providers in a cable TV style system.

Re:I used to block ads

[Flammon]

No, you're wrong. It's not a pay per view model. It's a "everyone pays whether they view or not" model. For example, I don't watch professional baseball but I absolutely pay for the players' salaries.

Re:I used to block ads

[Solandri]

Advertising is grease for the market. They don't just serve to help the seller make more sales. They help inform buyers that a product that they might want/find helpful actually exists and is available for purchase. So in that respect ads are good.

The problem is unwanted, intrusive, or excessive ads. For advertising to be effective, not only must it be cost-effective for the seller, it has to be cost-effective for the buyer. That is, the total increase in quality of life due to buying stuff you learned about from ads has to be worth the distraction of ads in content you're trying to enjoy. If the ads are not cost-effective for the buyer, the buyer is better off blocking them. That's what happens with email spam.

The problem for websites is that if the ads on one website annoys visitors to the point of installing an ad-blocker, all of them now have their ad revenue cut off.

Re:I used to block ads

[0111 1110]

Everyone who isn't attached to a university or willing to shell out hundreds of dollars a month is gonna get forced back into an AOL style walled garden were the provider can collect payment up front and then divy it out to the providers in a cable TV style system.

Why do you say that? That is not how it was before. If anything ISPs have gotten more expensive as the number of customers have grown. It used to be easy to find a 'full service' as you call it ISP for less than $10 per month. It was dialup, but dialup was all that existed at that time. I hate the commercialization of the internet. If some guy is running a site because he doesn't want to work a real job, well I sure as hell am not going to pay him for it.

Re:I used to block ads

[Lanterns]

Thank you for the uncited numbers you pulled from the air. I think they are fictitious and insupportable. News report: Businesses exist to make a profit. Websites have found no better way to make a profit on free sites than ads. The world ain't Wikipedia. If you can't put up with the ads, you aren't going to open your wallet, and those free sites are going to go under really quick if the majority of users all use Adblock.

Re:I used to block ads

[HiThere]

But adapting them to trustworthy transactions over the web is not straightforwards.

Re:I used to block ads

[0111 1110]

Well then the internet is doomed. Too bad. I will continue to run adblockers even on sites that I like (I am running one right now and have never seen a slashdot ad) and I will not stop. Ever. So the internet is just going to have to suck it up. Or figure out a way to defeat the blockers and then watch their traffic drop. Some, perhaps even many, people are only browsing the site because it's free. If it's not free they'll just go to some other site that is.

Re:I used to block ads

[multimediavt]

Went looking for info on your post and found this instead. The cost of consumer products goes down due to increased advertising. Makes sense when you think about it. Demand goes up as more people are informed, supply matches or exceeds demand and an equilibrium point is reached beyond which prices drop.

Re:I used to block ads

[BlackPignouf]

Lucky bastard! :D

In Germany, I have to pay 210€/year (270USD) for way too many channels and way too much advertising.
I don't own a TV set, I don't want one, but I still have to pay. From the few shows that I've seen, the quality is nowhere near BBC's.
The GEZ gets billions of € per year, and they're not even required to explain what they do with it.
For 210€/year, I could support many websites or newspapers.

Re:I used to block ads

[daveime]

John,

I loaded your blog to take a look, and it took less than a second. Then I disabled AdBlock and reloaded it, which took over 5 seconds.

The ad displayed is for a site called "www.Donwload.pconverter.com" (note the spelling mistake) ... which passed through Google's ad network where it drops multiple cookies onto my PC, before going to a site URL http://pconverter.com/d/

So, despite the ad lying to me about where it was going to send me, I end up on a site trying to get me to install yet another toolbar spyware application into my browser.

You tell me ? Would YOU click on that link ? Are you happy that whatever paltry income you make from your advertising is made at the cost of other innocent people getting tricked into installing deceptive spyware ?

Basically, fuck you for making your "income" using such a shitty advertising network. If you don't care about your users, why the fuck should they care about your advertising revenue ?

Re:I used to block ads

[CriminalNerd]

For videos that do not allow skipping, its more time efficient to flip to a different window while the ad plays.

Screw that, I'll just not watch it or watch the 5 or so reuploads that are suggested to me on the sidebar.
I /might/ consider it if I could mute individual browser tabs but I don't think that's possible yet.

Re:I used to block ads

[Kenshin]

Your site is collateral damage. They're not blocking your site specifically, it's just that ad-blocking is turned on by default.

So, if anything, blame all the sites out there with awful, intrusive ads that drove people to ad-blocking.

Re:I used to block ads

[0111 1110]

Then i realized exactly that without ads 3/4 of the internet would not exist.

The way I see it is that with ads the internet does not exist. On the very, very rare occasion that I try to browse without noscript + adblock it is unbearable. I'd rather not use the internet at all if it is ever reduced to that. I genuinely feel sorry for the stupid, technically ignorant 50% who don't know about noscript and adblockers. I don't think adblockers are really hurting advertisers at all because people smart enough to use them are also smart enough not to click on banner ads for any reason. The people who click on them are the same ones who respond to email spam. In that sense the internet is being funded by 100% pure stupidity.

Re:I used to block ads

[squiggleslash]

I got an ad for Hyundai. The ad network was AdSense.

I'm having trouble believing your story.

Re:I used to block ads

[Tom]

Then i realized exactly that without ads 3/4 of the internet would not exist.

Yes, but which parts?

Quantity doesn't equal quality. I'd rather have half the Internet if it were the better half.

Re:I used to block ads

[Tom]

Mod parent up.

I'm also running several sites and I hate advertisement. I'm very proud of the fact that all my sites are ad-free.

Re:I used to block ads

[Pseudonym Authority]

Except that no one will buy your shit if no one knows about it. Stop being such an idiot.

Re:I used to block ads

[Pseudonym Authority]

You mean like they did before on newspapers?

Re:I used to block ads

[melikamp]

You think pay-wall is worse then ad-wall?? Pay-walls make it hard to access the information, but ad-walls corrupt the information, form as well as substance. An ad-supported newspaper is hugely inferior to one driven by micro-payments, as the former is filled with undetectable marketing lies.

Re:I used to block ads

[Teun]

As in most of the non-english world :)

Re:I used to block ads

[geoskd]

This company did it quite explicitly starting fifty-one years ago. There is a good chance you even have their product in your home right now. Is more than half a century long enough for you? Maybe it isn't. I always, always seek out that brand specifically because of their no-ad pledge.

They may not be serving up ads, but their site is selling visitor information to Google and Facebook among others. I know this because no-script showed both as being blocked...

-=Geoskd

Re:I used to block ads

[Teun]

Oh, who is the idiot here?

You seriously think people wouldn't go out and buy a new one if x was broken?
You seriously think people would spend the rest of their life as couch potatoes to die of starvation>

Re:I used to block ads

[geoskd]

Not everything needs to be squeezed until it makes a buck, but as long as people keep seeing everything in the world with fucking dollar signs in their eyes the problem will continue.

As long as it requires money to eat, everything in this world will revolve around money. Any other belief is just self-delusion.

-=Geoskd

Re:I used to block ads

[Stormy Dragon]

It's going up because your ISP bill is paying for things like WatchESPN where it's behind a paywall but people don't notice that because the subscription is at the ISP level instead of the end user level.

That's the future: the content provider only let you into the site if your ISP "subscribes" to the site. As less and let mainstream content is available on the open internet, there will be less and less demand for "real" internet access.

Re:I used to block ads

[chrismcb]

To a certain extent that would be true, as you wouldn't be paying the middleman. BUT that didn't happen. In general people don't want to pay, so an alternative form of payment was devised, the ad.

Re:I used to block ads

[Sigg3.net]

Exactly. If you can't get by on ads, maybe a different strategy is needed.

If your content isn't unique enough, then perhaps a membership is worth something. Not a pay wall but a subscription to get to comment, backstage access etc. For non members the articles are read-only, this way you don't lose the surface area.

I hate the notion of ads being perceived as necessary or an elegant solution when they most often are not.

Re:I used to block ads

[DogDude]

DO me a favor. Go out, start a business, don't advertise, let us know how long you stay in business.

It's been 10 1/2 years for me. How 'bout you?

Re:I used to block ads

[GrahamJ]

Change that 100k to 20k and I can say all of the above verbatim. Cheers :D

Re:I used to block ads

[hawk]

hmm, looks like we've got a moderator that's new around here, too . . .

time to quote Zaphod Breeblebox . . .

hawk

Re:I used to block ads

[blackpig]

I got an ad for some junkware 'registry cleaner'.

Re:I used to block ads

[Darinbob]

Most businesses use advertisement as a small part of their operating expense, they actually make their money by selling products. Most businesses only advertise their own products, not serving up a hodge podge of ads for unrelated businesses. Most businesses also care about their good name with their customers, they don't try to annoy their customers, they don't serve up viruses, they don't send the advertisements C.O.D., etc.

Only on the internet with the rise of vapid web sites do people expect to serve up junk and expect to get paid for it solely with advertising. These are NOT businesses. Your blog is NOT a business.

If a business sticks a flyer underneath my windshield then I throw it away without reading it, that is an abusive business that I don't want to associate with. The same principle should apply to web sites instead of getting some mewling whines that they're not making enough money without the ads.

Re:I used to block ads

[Darinbob]

In the US we pay $50 or more for cable/satellite and still have to see advertisements. If we like, we can pay even more money to get HBO and Showtime and see advertisements on those channels as well (though usually less frequently).

(Actually before DVRs the ads were kind of useful. That's when the entire family would get up to stretch, go get a sandwich, use the toilet, etc.)

Re:I used to block ads

[gknoy]

I wonder how much the BBC would make if they let non-brits subscribe as well.

Re:I used to block ads

[TheRaven64]

For those unsure whether the above post is sarcasm and too lazy to read the linked article, the dot in the amounts is a thousands separator and not, as is conventional in English, a decimal point.

Re:I used to block ads

[Common Joe]

1 penny? It would start to matter what a "page" constituted, but still most of the websites, say 95%. At this rate I could owe as much as a dollar or two per day.

Yeah, I can see what a page would constitute. You know those "news" sites that have 20 pages just to get through the entire article and you never see any meat for real news? That'll be 20 cents, thank you. You'll be paying a lot more than a buck or two per day.

As long as ad-based sites have this kind of mentality, then we the readers will shun this kind of stupidty.

Microtransactions should work -- as you indicate. Apparently, it doesn't make the elite few bizillions of dollars.

Re:I used to block ads

[Reziac]

I'd never heard of it... but I have now. That's how it works.

Re:I used to block ads

[Reziac]

This, exactly. Back when banner ads tended to be funny or interesting and were always ignorable, and when text ads tended to be relevant and also always ignorable, I didn't bother blocking them; I only blocked the obnoxious ones and the bandwidth hogs. Then came along flash and popups and various other sorts that grab you by the throat, and I gradually expanded what I block... finally said to hell with them all and blocked everything.

And as ads became increasingly deceptive, I went from trusting ads enough to occasionally click on one, to absolutely NEVER clicking on an ad for any reason.

Re:I used to block ads

[BasilBrush]

jebus, almost $20 / month subscription to a crappy channel that has things I dont want to watch, like period dramas and science programs?

The BBC provide not one, but 10 channels. And they are certainly the best channels in Britain, and amongst the best in the world, possibly the very best. They certainly aren't crappy. If you can't find anything you want to watch in that lot, the problem is yours, not the quality of the channels.

Given your lack of knowledge of the channels the BBC provides, it appears you're an American, who's speaking from ignorance. Probably one of those stupid libertarians given the nature of the argument and the lack of literacy.

Re:I used to block ads

[JonStewartMill]

Advertising is societal corrosion. It eats away at our experiences, it reshapes our thoughts, it homogenizes and neuters our culture, and it's all because people such as yourself see "not making any money" as an inherent problem with all sorts of aspects of our lives.

No mod points to bestow, but I'd like to buy you a beer.

Re:I used to block ads

[noh8rz10]

I'm american, speaking from the principle "I'll choose what I spend my money on." If bbc is so great, why can't it do an HBO model where people pay to subscribe? it could go worldwide, with people in UK, US, Aus, elsewhere all paying. Mucho dinero here!

Re:I used to block ads

[Archangel Michael]

Your view is that advertising costs money, it is wrong. Advertising saves money to all involved. It increases the ability to be efficient.

It is like saying buying a power saw to replace a hand saw "costs" money, is true when taken out of context and left by itself. However, when one measures how much more efficient one is with a power tool than with a hand tool, able to cut more wood, more precisely, the cost of NOT doing it is much greater than the cost of the item being purchased. Advertising is exactly the same thing.

My point is that while it does "cost", the efficiencies are greater and therefore the "cost" is irrelevant.

Re:I used to block ads

[wisnoskij]

I am sure that is correct, but the studies do not mean longitudinally. 99.5% of all current societal "needs" are only needs because of a century (if not considerably more) of concerted effort by advertisers who use continually more and more advanced psychology.

If advertisements never existed America would likely be more like Europe and everyone would not need to own their own homes, and buy a new car every year.
Also in both continents, "needs" double like every decade. And advertisements are a significant cause.

Over the short term 9-12 is completely reasonable and I am sure fairly accurate. But it does not take into account cultural shifts and long term psychological training brought about by advertisements. ~10% of all sold goods are sold with a directly correlation to a specific advertisement champaign, but ~99% are sold because of the psychological training by ads, on both a individual and cultural level.

Re:I used to block ads

[buxomspacefish]

That sounds a lot like piratebay to me :P

Re:I used to block ads

[Morgon]

Well this is kind of the reverse of the discussion, but I'll play:

Your analogy isn't the same. Just because they don't do TV ads doesn't mean they don't have advertising.
As a retail product, the product itself is the ad - a physical one.
When you stand in the aisle for sunblock and you see this large bottle with its bright packaging, being offered for the same price as smaller-sized bottles, I'm sure they will have plenty of customers. But this is a physical product in a physical location, neither of which we're discussing here.

Contrast this to a (presumably non-retail) service, whether that is online content, a gaming stats/community site (one of which I personally ran for several years, so these Slashdot stories always interest me), or even cutting lawns, the parent post was right in that you probably won't stay afloat without some sort of outgoing advertising. And to bring it back on-topic - if you're not selling a product, and provide a service that ends up being popular, how are you going to pay for the additional resources to both serve your existing userbase and handle more? Either you're paywall or you serve ads.

Re:I used to block ads

[redlemming]

Advertising is societal corrosion. It eats away at our experiences, it reshapes our thoughts, it homogenizes and neuters our culture, and it's all because people such as yourself see "not making any money" as an inherent problem with all sorts of aspects of our lives.

Another problem with advertising: it violates what should be a fundamental human right, namely the right to not be forced to be part of an audience. Just as the freedom to wave one's fist around can be constrained when that fist goes into another person's private space, so should the freedom to publish (i.e. rights such as freedom of the press, freedom of speech) be constrained when it intrudes into another person's life.

Or, in other words, one is not living in a free country if one is coerced into watching, seeing, or hearing advertising.

Re:I used to block ads

[JarinArenos]

I am not an economist so I may be missing something obvious, but it sounds like your model has two possible economic models: 1) Take large personal losses for what is essentially a "labor of love" and shows you no return on your time... OR 2) Magic. I would actually love to be corrected here. What community are you speaking of and where do the funds to support it come from?

Re:I used to block ads

[kamapuaa]

And endless comedies where the joke is, they think some guy is homosexual! Meanwhile, the most popular shows are American. Sounds great.

Re:I used to block ads

[volmtech]

What if you don't like what they show? What do they care if no one watches, they get your tax money anyway.

Re:I used to block ads

[Type44Q]

I thought "they were the first ones against the wall when the Revolution came." :p

Re:I used to block ads

[volmtech]

What if no one advertised? How would we know what to buy and where to find what we needed? Do you think a web search would work? Or how about driving around until you see a store that might have what you need? I wonder how much Progressive insurance pays per policy holder for all those commercials. At least make advertising a non tax deductible expense.

Re:I used to block ads

[zyphyrus]

Agreed. Also I realized many ads ran by ad networks contained pretty adult material (those big book ads) or those with obnoxious autoplay. The best remedy is to block them all. However I do understand the need for sites to generate add money, so I actually whitelist some ads on websites I support (generally only with non-intrusive, text ads. Just my two cents.

Re:I used to block ads

[BasilBrush]

And endless comedies where the joke is, they think some guy is homosexual!

What are you taking about?

Meanwhile, the most popular shows are American.

No they're not.
http://www.barb.co.uk/viewing/weekly-top-30?_s=4

Simpsons and NCIS do make appearances on the list for the commercial (non BBC) channels, but they are way down the list. The most popular programs by far are British.

Re:I used to block ads

[BasilBrush]

The figures show that they do watch. BBC1 is by far the most popular channel.

http://www.barb.co.uk/viewing/weekly-total-viewing-summary?_s=4

Re:I used to block ads

[Bert64]

Not exactly, i made two complaints...
1, i detest obnoxious ads containing sound which detract from the site your trying to visit (the one that first made me search for ad blockers was that annoying mosquito ad that came up in a backgrounded tab making its awful buzzing noise which made me think my speakers were broken)
2, they dont need to track me to see the ip address im connecting from, when i go to watch some videos online i get a very nasty and discriminatory "your country is unworthy of viewing this content" message, but they will happily subject me to the ad and mock me with content they feel i'm unworthy to view.

Re:I used to block ads

[Myopic]

Good question. No, it isn't.

Re:I used to block ads

[Myopic]

Oh, hey, I can almost see the goalpost you moved from over here where it was when I kicked the field goal.

Re:I used to block ads

[Myopic]

It's a website. Websites aren't ads any more than a JCPenny's store is an ad for JCPenny's.

Re:I used to block ads

[Myopic]

Dude, you should consider advertising. It can really help get the word out.

Re:I used to block ads

[GrumpySteen]

You were the one being all proud of supporting a company that doesn't advertise. I just pointed out that they advertise their other products, which means you're proud of supporting a company that doesn't advertise one out of four lines of their product.

You may have thought you kicked a field goal, but all you did was bounce the ball off a cheerleader's head.

Re:I used to block ads

[Myopic]

I paraphrase you as saying "You pointed to a company/brand which doesn't advertise but that doesn't count because there is a corporate relationship to some other company/brand which does advertise."

That is moving the goalpost. The question was about is there a company which lasts a long time without advertising. I gave one example, thus answering the question, which was a particularly fitting example because the no-ad aspect is up-front to the product. Other companies in a corporate hierarchy are a separate question.

Also I didn't express 'pride' for supporting the company, I expressed 'preference'. I consider No-Ad to be basically "generic" product and I often like generic products when they are up to quality standards. Some generics are higher quality than name brand; most are equal; some are lower enough to be avoided. All generic products are unadvertised by definition and that is one aspect I like about them, I consider it a pro-consumer way to do business by both refraining from annoying me (with ads) and passing on the savings in the form of a lower price.

Re:I used to block ads

[samwichse]

Hah! Another happy No-Ad user here... I also buy it specifically because they don't advertise.

Re:I used to block ads

[NemosomeN]

You seem incredibly naive. If something costs more than its benefit, nobody will pay for it to exist. Someone is going to need to make a buck to lay fiber, keep switches and routers running, and make repairs. There's not much in the world that is free. As for ads in other places, in general, you're right, ignoring roadside billboards which, because of property taxes, are debatable.

Re:I used to block ads

[mujadaddy]

If the threat is that all the commercial enterprises are going to vanish from the internet and we're going to end up back in a time when the internet was for enthusiasts generating and trading information and content among each other without having to monetize absolutely every fucking page load, then by all means -- I'm on board.

This, so fucking hard. Used to be you spent hundreds a month on modem fees to give your BBS content away.

Re:I used to block ads

[daveime]

Google IS AdSense !!!

You're having trouble believing my story because two distinct individuals in different parts of the world got served different ads ?

And I suppose the poster under you was lying too ? Obviously it's just some massive global conspiracy to attack some shitty blog write and deprive him of his 0.076 cents of ad revenue this month ?

Or perhaps if he wants to treat his users with some respect, and install a decent ad network (hint: Google doesn't make it decent), maybe they won't block his ads anymore.

Re:I used to block ads

[thebestjoe]

I have not ran an online community but have been using the web for ages. What you say here is exactly how I feel.

Re:I used to block ads

[uninformedLuddite]

They're not just annoying some can even possibly get you gaoled. I was once browsing the seedy underside of the web(many years ago now) and got ten pages pop up covered in thumbnails of child porn. When I finally shut them all down a last page popped up warning me about the FBI and offering to sell me evidence eliminator.

i don't know...

[Anonymous Coward]

don't use advertising as a business model?

Re:i don't know...

[Anonymous Coward]

don't use advertising as a business model?

Care to propose an alternative? For how many of the sites you visited today have you paid a subscription? I'm sure your /. subscription is paid up, and you're just too lazy to log in

Re:i don't know...

[jones_supa]

I have a simple and good solution. Allow visitors to pay some (reasonably small) sum to get rid of advertisements. You would send $5 via PayPal to disable advertisements for 6-12 months, something like that.

The website gets its funding and users get rid of advertisements. Maybe throw in some little extra goodies to subscribers.

Re:i don't know...

[jafiwam]

don't use advertising as a business model?

Care to propose an alternative? For how many of the sites you visited today have you paid a subscription? I'm sure your /. subscription is paid up, and you're just too lazy to log in

It's not for us to come up with an alternate. YOU are the one with the failed business model. You fix it yourself.

Re:i don't know...

[2fuf]

How many sites offer the possibility without ridiculous recurring subscriptions that are way off the scale in pricing?

Re:i don't know...

[spxZA]

Newspapers rely on advertising as their main source of incoming. The few dollars you pay for a copy are for distribution costs. That being said, there has been a massive struggle to move that business model as-is onto the internet, for various reasons, including people running adblockers and a general lack of understanding of this new medium. As webmasters become more desperate for advertising sales, they come up with new (annoying) ideas to ensure visibility - popups, popunders, popins, and forced ads before videos. All of these just cause frustration on both sides and users use ad blockers, or just learn to ignore them. There's been a big topic of relevance. Users respond better to adverts that are more relevant to them. I call shenanigans on this. This is only partially true. If I am browsing a site related to financial markets, I am not interesting in Hobby King targeting an advert of a part that I looked at on their site a few days prior. My mindset while viewing this site is that of business, not play. In the same vein, Destructoid has the following adverts on their home page (probably targeted to me): Social Media Marketing from Vertical Response, Start your own gaming business from Game Wars, The frequent Download/Play belonging to some cellphone subscription service, Linode (even though I am a linode customer), Google Apps for Business, A conference for Data Center World. Maybe some of these are targeted to me, but while I am browsing a gaming site, I don't care about anything else that is not related to gaming. My point here is, relevance is true, but target something at me that is relevant to me AND relevant to what I am currently doing. I don't want to have to think about or reminded about work while I am on Destructoid. Back in the day before the rise of these ad delivery networks, people used to put adverts up on their site manually. And only adverts that were relevant to them and their audience. Nowadays, these ad networks do allow you to customize the type of adverts that appear on your site. It seems that this is not being done, and webmasters are using the shotgun approach, allowing any type of advert to be targeted to their users. This is just plain laziness. Also, where is the sponsorship that we see everywhere else? Companies pay a premium to sponsor a TV show (blah blah brought to you buy blah blah). This helps both the advertiser target a specific audience and the content provider pay for the content. If Destructoid want to continue to rely on advertising for their income (and please do), they need to do some serious work on making sure that the advertisers on their site are relevant to themselves and their users. Content producers off-line have very close relationships with their advertisers. Strike up a deal with Razer or EA to do some skinning just before a product launch. I'm not suggesting "selling out", but rather realize that you are running a business selling content to us. We buy it by looking at your adverts. If we don't like your adverts, we will block them. If we don't like your content, we won't visit your site. It is up to you to connect us with your advertisers via your content.

Re:i don't know...

[spxZA]

Damn it, apologies for the crappy formatting.

Re:i don't know...

[jones_supa]

My idea allows you to not pay any fees and continue watching advertisements just like before.

I am not talking about a complete paywall system, just a feature to throw a dime in the guitar case to disable the ads instead of being a "AdBlock freeloader".

Re:i don't know...

[nametaken]

I think it's an interesting question. Most of the sites people use are ad supported, and if total blocking is becoming more prevalent, everyone is going to need a replacement.

As a user, I use the nuclear option for ad blocking and whitelist sites I use every day. But that's me going out of my way to be fair about it. People aren't going to do that. It works out well for me because most of the good sites worth visiting frequently don't do the horrible auto-play videos or serve up malware, anyway (the AV still checks).

I don't pretend to have a better idea that would work for everyone, but I think it's a discussion we'll be revisiting more often in the future.

Re:i don't know...

[AcidPenguin9873]

Christ. In this particular story, the comments are going to be discussing alternatives, because that's pretty much what the article asks about. If you don't want to talk about alternatives, and instead want to just sit around until someone else invents them, why on Earth would you bother reading the comment section of this particular article? Just to make snarky posts and degrade the overall quality of the discussion?

Re:i don't know...

[Fuzzums]

If we don't like your adverts, we will block them. (..) It is up to you to connect us with your advertisers via your content.

No. I'm done with shouting flash banners, shaking animated gifs and shizzle, so I have blocked ALL ads.
After that I MIGHT decide, on a per site basis, if I would like them to show me their ads.

But for the rest I agree with you. If potential ads would be relevant for a site, they might even have some added value.

Re:i don't know...

[Dogtanian]

It's not for us to come up with an alternate. YOU are the one with the failed business model. You fix it yourself.

There's no indication that "HE/SHE" is personally following this "failed business model"; assuming this says more about how polarised and partisan about the issue *you* feel than it does about them.

But this is beside the point- which is that it can (or should) be easily understood that the issue being raised in the summary *wasn't* the face value one about a business funding itself, but the clearly implied one of how trustworthy, independent journalism can be funded if advertising wasn't cutting it and there were no reliable alternatives.

I already commented in more depth here, but the short version is that while *we* aren't obliged to fix their business model, "THEY" aren't obliged to provide us with content either, and if we care about it, that makes it "OUR" problem.

Re:i don't know...

[Teun]

Instead of an apology you could have formatted it and resend... :)

Re:i don't know...

[sandytaru]

This is the model for one of the video game forum websites I post in frequently. General access to most forum functions is free. A paid subscription is $25 a year, and for that you get unlimited custom avatars, the ability to store and post images within forum posts, access to the mobile version of the site, and no ads. I let my subscription lapse for a few months last year, and finally re-subbed just to get rid of the incredibly annoying background image ads. They didn't even flash or anything, but they were one giant link and so if you accidentally clicked anywhere outside the actual forum page, you had a new browser tab open taking you to the advertiser's site.

I'd say about 25% of the high post count folks (more than ten thousand posts) pay for access. The majority of low post count users do not - I guess if you only post there once a week, there's no reason to shut off ads.

Re:i don't know...

[Myopic]

Seriously why does Slashdot do that?

Re:i don't know...

[PlusFiveTroll]

don't use advertising as a business model?

Use better advertising as the business model.

I was a subscriber to a popular forum. I payed for the service so I could post links to the products my family made. I didn't have flashy banner ads, instead I just posted topics and answered questions. I was not allowed to spam. I was not allowed to 'advertise' in threads that didn't have anything to do with the product. I was allowed to post links to my website. The site didn't have annoying banner ads. It didn't beg its users for money. The site did monitor its paying users and kicked the ones that didn't follow the rules. Customers loved it, vendors loved it (well the ones that weren't scam artists).

It worked very well.

Only reason I'm not doing it today was a sickness in the family didn't allow us to continue sales and manufacture of the products.

Re:i don't know...

[aaaaaaargh!]

how trustworthy, independent journalism can be funded if advertising wasn't cutting it

No site in the world offers trustworthy, independent journalism and is primarily paid from advertisement money. That would be a contradiction in terms.

Re:i don't know...

[Desler]

Except if 50%+ of the people are blocking the ads, why would they pay the removal donation? Also that doesn't even sound remotely sustainable.

Re:i don't know...

[Pentium100]

Now with broadband the way it is, you can't be your own provider.

Well, at some point you need to connect to the internet and you most likely will have to pay whoever connects you, but you can (if you have the $$$) get the connection from the upstream providers like level3 or whatever, though you will have a problem getting IPs now - since as I understand it, all IPv4 address space is allocated.

And you can set up a VPN for the "community system" - yes, you will still have to pay for the internet connection, but you had to pay for the land lines anyway.

Oh, and the old modems still work, so you can use them if you want...

Re:i don't know...

[Darinbob]

Alternatives are easy. Don't serve up third party ads. Those are the cheap-ass ads anyway, done by a site without any time and effort to spend on their own product. Just subscribe to an ad service, add a couple lines of HTML, and wait for money to roll in.

Don't serve up Flash ads, or animated GIFs, or Java, or Javascript tricks.

Don't stop me from going to your content with an intermediate page that forces me to see an ad (it's a blank page for me anyway). And especially don't force me to watch 15 seconds of your stupid advertisers video before I can click past the page.

Don't serve up viruses. Ok, maybe you didn't write them yourself, but you certainly farmed out your advertising to people who did, by just adding a couple lines to your HTML in hopes that money would roll in. You can't pass the buck that easily.

Don't suck up my bandwidth. Present the content. If you have a few ads here and there that's fine. Don't go overboard. I don't want ads down both the left and right side. Don't stick in stupid re-share buttons for Facebook/Twitter and other stupid pages unrelated to you. Remember when people used to complain about the thin ad-banners at the top of pages, do you think they'll complain less now with so many more ads?

Re:i don't know...

[spxZA]

View page source, search for my nick, and you'll see it with plenty of \n's.

Re:i don't know...

[psithurism]

Look no farther than the current site, that has long been known as slashvertisement.com.

Instead of publishing honest game reviews, let the gaming companies slip you bribes for better ratings and your attention!

Just don't let your readers find out; they are of the firm belief that all services provided to them should be from the charity of strangers' souls and free of cost.

Re:i don't know...

[Nothing2Chere]

Allow visitors to pay some (reasonably small) sum to get rid of advertisements.

The first year I paid for a Pandora subscription my music listening experience changed. I hadn't even realized how much interruption I was really getting until it wasn't there. Now I recommend it to everyone I know who uses their service.

n2ch

Start turning the cogs

[Tagged_84]

How about they work on creating something worth paying/subscribing to? Simple to suggest, hard to deliver. Perhaps that's the reason? I've been getting into Giant Bomb more lately and if I had a job I would consider trying out their premium service.

Re:Start turning the cogs

[Tagged_84]

opps never mind, RTFA and it's right there at the bottom :)

Re:Start turning the cogs

[zenith1111]

The problem with that (subscription) revenue model is that there are lots of sites with decent content that lots of people enjoy but almost no one is willing to pay for, I would only be willing to pay for just a couple of all the sites I view daily. I'm perfectly happy to tolerate a couple of ads per page, the AdBlock problem was caused by greedy people that filled the pages with lots of annoying and distracting flashing random colors, enough flash ads to make my laptop fan scream and even screaming loud videos that would autoplay.

Re:Start turning the cogs

[Lumpy]

No the problem is a lot of the subscription sites want a subscription price that is far higher than the content value.

I subscribe to several sites. $5.00 a year for about $10.00 Value a year worth of information.

Slashdot? way overpriced for it's value returned.

The problem is most websites have people running them thinking they will get rich off of it. Your aim is to cover operation costs and then possibly a small profit IF you provide value.

Re:Start turning the cogs

[Electricity Likes Me]

Also known as the "micro-transactions aren't micro" problem.

Re:Start turning the cogs

[DaveV1.0]

Why don't you ask Slashdot how that subscription thing is working out? In fact, why don't you ask ON Slashdot who people feel about paywalls? Oh, wait, you probably already know.

Re:Start turning the cogs

[Albanach]

Also known as the "micro-transactions aren't micro" problem.

This I think hits the nail on the head. I want to have some equivalent of a wallet that can be built into the browser. Visit a site where you get a preview of an article, get told how many words remain, and then have an option to pay a cent or two for a big article, or a fraction of a cent for a small one and read the rest.

To work it would, of course, have to be cross border, cross browser and cross platform. Ideally, with open standards we could have a choice of payment providers too.

Unfortunately, for all the talk of micro-payments, I've never seen a serious attempt at implementing them.

Re:Start turning the cogs

[fyngyrz]

Slashdot could make subscriptions work, I think, if they fixed the moderation problems. I really like it here, think highly of the content, but the utterly broken moderation forces me to read at -1, which, frankly, I resent.

All subscriptions really offer you is the ability to have a list of your old (stale) comments -- which you can find via Google anyway.

If the subscription gave you a working site with user-id'd thumbs up and down and the ability to disallow users to affect moderation of posts you're looking at, I'd be all in. For example, you see a post from Joe with a thumbs down from me, that you think is worthy. You'd add me to your list of "thumbs downs from these people don't count." Next time you see a post from Joe, my thumbs down doesn't show. That allows users to directly moderate the moderation; I can tailor what I see to be what I want, and it won't affect your tailoring at all.

I think slashdot has some of the best posters on the Internet. They could fix it pretty easily. The problem has always been hubris; they think it's *already* as good as it can be, and they have never listened to suggestions. So slashdot's value has always been in spite of management, rather than with management's assistance. It's all about the geeks. Geeks, generally speaking, are good. If you're a bit thick skinned, admittedly, but I am, and so I like it here.

Re:Start turning the cogs

[mujadaddy]

Unfortunately, for all the talk of micro-payments, I've never seen a serious attempt at implementing them.

So the problem isn't that commercial websites are greedy, it's that banks, et al, are greedy? Surely there's a simple solution staring everyone in the face that I can't think of right now either.

Also, I'm not discounting the fact that Google is a big part of the Ad Thing's perpetuation. Finding [N] on the internet used to be done differently when you weren't guaranteed money for it...

Subscription model

[roman_mir]

If the number of the users is not growing itself (which is not obvious from TFA) but only the percentage of users that use ad-blockers is growing, then don't you have to admit at some point that you have to change the business model and possibly try to charge a subscription fee? But in order to retain clients then you have to provide them with something actually tangible for their money. I have never heard of their site (I basically don't play video games, so I don't know much about the site), but I suppose they don't send out physical magazine or anything like that, it's a pure on-line business. But they have to figure out either how to go around the ad-blocking software or they have to figure out another way to get revenue, and maybe they should offer a subscription and bundle something extra with it (like an actual physical copy of their articles if anybody is interested)?

However I suspect that many sites facing the same problem will just shut down, since their model is purely ad based and technologically they can't really win, so it's their business model that will have to adapt or die out.

Re:Subscription model

[Mithent]

I hope that we won't see many more sites moving to a paywall model. There are few sites that I'm sufficiently interested in on a day-to-day basis that I'm going to pay a subscription fee to access them - I'll just turn away. Just yesterday I saw what might have been a vaguely interesting article on a pay site (a large American newspaper, though I forget which - no, not the NYT), but I only got the first couple of sentences unless I signed up with a view to paying monthly. I never normally read that site and I'm not likely to start, so I'd never subscribe. Nor would I have paid for the article itself, microtransaction-style: opinion articles on Apple's future direction aren't important enough to me that I'd open my wallet. I'd much rather have read the article and given them their ad revenue (as I don't block ads).
 
A lot of the value of the Web to me is being able to flit between sites, not being locked out of most unless I make a long-term commitment or having to make regular judgments about the monetary value of content I haven't read. That loss of freedom and immediacy would be a significant one, for me, and I'm more than willing to tolerate some ads to keep that.

Re:Subscription model

[Lumpy]

you can easily get around paywalls by using the google cache. If a site does not get google index the pay pages, nobody will ever come and visit looking for the content. By letting google index it, the google cache holds the content.

Re:Subscription model

[roman_mir]

I know what you are saying, but you are not part of their revenue stream and so when the try to figure out how to stay afloat they will think much less of what to do about clients like you rather than about people who would subscribe or somehow support their model.

It's really not magic, they are not USA government, they cannot print dollars and wait for the inevitable inflation to destroy the currency, they have to have revenue, they have to cover their expenses and they have to have some profit (otherwise there is no incentive for the investment to be tied up in that business). So the question for them is how to design a business model that would give them that revenue and profit.

It is possible that they could do it by offering some material for free (and people that would otherwise completely ignore their site would read some of their material, this way at least their brand would be more recognised) and some material would only be offered to the subscribers (like I said, a site can offer a printed version of the magazine or maybe it can have some other merchandise).

Maybe they can have ads that are part of the on-line material, embedded in such a way that for an ad-blocker it would be impossible to distinguish that there is an ad within the material.

It's possible to have an article with an ad on it that is not text for example, but that is an image. So they could convert some text into an image, embed some ads into that image and serve that to people who otherwise wouldn't read their site if it was behind a pay wall.

It's possible to do all sorts of things, like use Flash to serve text mixed with ads (I would not read articles that way, but who knows, make it interesting enough material and I may once in a while).

It's possible to offer more to people who subscribe. Again, as I said, from TFA it is not clear whether their entire user base stays the same and more and more people are using ad-blockers or whether their user base is growing and the percentage of ad-blocking users is growing faster. But if their user base is growing, then maybe they don't really have as much of a problem.

OTOH it is also possible that many of these sites will have to consolidate one day and have some form of pay wall and some material without it, but they would have to have one large site with many sites behind them.

This is the cable model, where you get dozens of channels bundled together while in reality you are only interested in 3 of them, but you are paying a subscription fee basically. But if they did this, I would suggest not charging a flat fee but actually allowing people to pick their poison and only pay for the part they are interested in, while being able to read some free material from other parts, so at least they'd know what else is out there.

Re:Subscription model

[Mithent]

I entirely agree that they need revenue - I wasn't saying that I shouldn't give anything back. What I give back is advertising revenue, by being willing to accept advertisements in return for the content. It's been how the Web has generally worked for years, and also supports TV channels and free newspapers etc. My worry is that because blocking ads is becoming so prevalent, this model is becoming uneconomical, and so that option is being taken away.
 
If they can offer subscriptions that provide more value, then that's great, absolutely, and something which I might well look into at those sites which I value most. I still have a subscription to a print magazine despite most if its articles being posted online, for one, because sometimes it's nice to read a print magazine. I also pay my TV license for the BBC, which I could legitimately opt out of because I watch next to no live TV, but I don't begrudge that considering the BBC content I consume. My concern is that casual browsing in return for advertisements will become increasingly less possible.
 
I'd be happy if the choice was either to accept ads or pay a subscription (maybe with some extra incentives), certainly. I just don't want the latter to start becoming the only option, as has started to become the case on some sites.

Re:Subscription model

[rodarson2k]

Marketers shouldn't be paying for ads the way they are now anyway, because shotgun ads almost certainly don't work.

The ONLY time in my adult life that i've cared about an advertisement was recently when google informed me that there was a new bus route to a local airport while i was viewing my airline ticket info in gmail. That was certainly a targeted ad, and also the only 'effective' one among the tens of thousands of ads i've seen in the last few decades. Be about 10000x more targeted about advertising and i'll be about 10000x more interested in it.

If ads were more of an amazon.com-style "users who liked this site tended to buy product X" and less of a "PRODUCT X IS THE BEST THING EVER FOR EVERYONE EVER!", I'd actively LOOK at ads (sometimes)

Well this is happening in Sweden ...

[Picardo85]

The swedish gaming journalism website FZ has started informing their users how the ad-blocking is hurting their business.
And I do think that most gamers who frequent that said site have started unblocking ads on said site so that they can continue to enjoy the reviews and other content on the site.

However, I don't think that this is a solution for EVERY site, but it might be a solution for sites with a large steady user base.

Re:Well this is happening in Sweden ...

[bogaboga]

Finally..."touch down for common sense."

Re:Well this is happening in Sweden ...

[Shinobi]

The irony is that FZ only started having those "problems" a short while after a major publisher bought them, and the content started becoming more bland and "professional".

Re:Well this is happening in Sweden ...

[Splab]

Well, if they want me to view ads, it's very easy.
1. Host them your self you lazy ass fucktards! There is nothing more frustrating for users than waiting some 3-5 seconds for some stupid adserver to respond with whatever crap they want to sell. Also, adnetworks are prime system for spreading malware, vet your friggin ads, host them and serve them proper.
2. No flash. No moving about. No Sound.

Do that and you wont be blocked (by me).

Re:Well this is happening in Sweden ...

[wvmarle]

You forget another major one: make them on topic.

When I visit a gamers site, I would expect game ads, and (if they link to a useful page) would be happy to click on them to find out more about the advertised game. Game companies could offer special discounts for people clicking on their ads on those gamers sites - incentive to unblock ads, plus promoting their game directly to their main audience. May hand them a decent number of direct sales, too.

It is of course up to the web site to remain editorial independence, and to mark advertising clearly as advertising.

Most of the advertising you see on the Internet has nothing to do with the content of the site they're on. They're just flashing, distracting pieces of irritation that take away from the experience of the site you try to visit.

Re:Well this is happening in Sweden ...

[nametaken]

1. Host them your self you lazy ass fucktards! There is nothing more frustrating for users than waiting some 3-5 seconds for some stupid adserver to respond with whatever crap they want to sell. Also, adnetworks are prime system for spreading malware, vet your friggin ads, host them and serve them proper.

Sites often use ad brokers to erase the difference between what the site operator and the ad buyer say is happening in the way of impressions and clicks. Without a neutral broker in the middle to serve the ads and handle redirected clicks associated with those ads, neither side can trust stats from the other.

Also, small sites can't bring in new advertising clients, because they're not Google or the New York Times. That's part of why ad networks exist in the first place.

Re:Well this is happening in Sweden ...

[Splab]

Well, for one, clicks and pageviews are old old ways of measure and are pretty much dead. What counts are conversions and those are pretty fucking easy to track, after all, they will be visiting you.

Also, 3rd party cookies are going to be blocked by Firefox, which means Chrome and the rest will follow suit soon enough, which means ad networks are going to have a tough time unless they reinvent themselves.

Make ad placement a part of the editorial job again, have competent people place them and you will see conversions go back up.

Re:Well this is happening in Sweden ...

[allypally]

Agreed. And more.

The average ad these days is some sort of script they they want to run on my device.

Any program I run on my device should have at least a certificate so I know the code has been verified by an independent authority,

And, as the script is running mainly for a third-party's benefit, I'd like to know that they are covering the insurance for any loss or damaged caused by their property running wild on my device.

Then I might sit back and watch the ad.

Until then, it's a wee too dangerous for me to consider.

Re:Well this is happening in Sweden ...

[PlusFiveTroll]

And how do you propose they keep track of ad views? This is why ads are hosted remotely - the ad hosting company can see that /. downloaded 12 ads to display, therefore /. receives compensation for dispalying 12 ads.

This is the ad hosting companies problem. They do not manage their reputation in any way.

If your GPS tries to send you thru the ghetto you quickly 'block' that route out. This is what the ad companies have done, they route us to the BLINKING BLINKING BLINKING, flash taking over your screen, malware launching ghetto of the internet and then they wonder why we filter their routes out.

Re:Well this is happening in Sweden ...

[RedBear]

Here is what I simply don't understand about all this. I block ads because they are annoying as hell and I NEVER click on any of them anyway, so whether I am looking at ads or not, the companies doing the advertising will NEVER make any money off me through those ads. The people who bother to block ads are mostly the same as me, so who are the advertisers going to blame when everyone turns off their ad blockers and they STILL don't sell enough products per billion ad impressions?

Isn't the main problem here that the whole Internet advertising scheme is faulty? Ad prices have been plummeting each year for the entire history of the Internet because they are orders of magnitude less effective than advertisers imagined they would be. The people who are going to click on ads AND BUY THE PRODUCTS through those ad links are exactly the same people who don't bother to block ads in the first place. So I don't see what difference it will make if the people who WON'T click on your ads and WON'T buy your products consent to view the ads. All the websites will be doing is almost fraudulently inflating the impact/distribution of ads on their site while failing to provide any additional value to the people advertising their products.

No, even if everyone suddenly turned off their ad blockers the Internet would continue to descend into a place where sites that can't pay for themselves any other way will have to show exponentially more ads (since the ad prices will continue to decrease) until it will be impossible to find any actual content betwixt all the ads. Since this has basically already happened on a ton of useless sites I'd say it's pretty well proven that the Internet advertising model is a failure, and ad blocking couldn't account for more than a small percentage of this failure. It's basically a type of pyramid scheme that is continually collapsing in on itself, and in the long term it will fail completely.

A functional micro-payment system is the only thing that will keep sites alive in the future. Until that gets figured out, websites that don't directly charge users for some kind of valued product or service will continue to fail. The idea of running free websites solely on the advertising model with no other source of income is pure bunk from the get-go.

Re:Well this is happening in Sweden ...

[hawk]

>2. No flash. No moving about. No Sound.

Bingo.

No blink; no animation.

Stay the *)*&% put.

I have never, ever blocked an ad just for being an ad.

I *do* block everything that moves around when I" trying to read, including part of what sites fancy to be "content."

(Hey, dummy: I'm *reading*. I don't want some scrolling bar of video).

I even have adblock set to "allow unintrusive."

Oh, and make sure they're coming off a blinding-fast server--waiting for something to load is another reason to block it's domain.

hawk

Re:Well this is happening in Sweden ...

[Darinbob]

Don't forget that the web site visitor has to pay to see the advertisements, even text only ones. The internet is not free and those images don't magically appear on a computer. Sometimes the cost is sort of hidden, in the sense that the customer just pays for an ISP w/o a cap, however over time the customer notices that the internet is kind of slow and thus is compelled to upgrade to a faster ISP. Dialup used to be ok, but with all these ads you need expensive broadband just to look at the same old web sites. Also all these animated GIFs and Flash ads are causing people to notice that their whole computer is kind of slow and compels them to buy faster computers. They end up with more viruses, causing them to buy more anti malware products.

Re:Well this is happening in Sweden ...

[TheRaven64]

It's odd that Google invests so much money and effort in trying to create a profile of me to target ads at, when their older model of targeting them at the page content worked so much better. The fact that I may be in the market for some category of product at approximately this time is far less relevant than the fact that I am interested in a specific topic right now.

Re:Well this is happening in Sweden ...

[Common Joe]

Before the Internet, stores sent out flyers via snail mail. There was no way to track individual users on a per click basis or a conversion basis. It seemed to work pretty well. Perhaps a return to something like that for the Internet?

ad networks

[gbjbaanb]

Pretty much the answer is to embed ads in the site code itself, rather than simply link to some dodgy advertising company's site.

I recall WebhostingTalk site had a pdf describing their site that they would use for potential advertisers, you paid your money and supplied some ads in the required formats and they'd put them in their site themselves. Nowadays, 'ads' are just a couple of clicks to the most annoying syndicated rubbish (along with all the tracking cookies) that have nothing to do with the site you're looking at, except an easy way to attract money.

So the solution for this site is simply to work at getting the advertisers and give up the ad networks.

Re:ad networks

[Yetihehe]

And no animated ads. I use adblock, but there are several sites which make unobtrusive relevant ads. I've unblocked them, and even sometimes I find something interesting enough to buy.

Re:ad networks

[martin-boundary]

Or they could sell subscriptions (to readers) and syndication rights (to other newspapers, and aggregators like Google). Presumably the original content has value. I'd be suspicious if the content was supposed valuable, but nobody but advertisers was actually willing to pay for it.

Re:ad networks

[MickLinux]

Biggie here. I work at a concrete plant, and we sometimes need to check the weather loops. At our remote location, the only internet available is by way of AT&T through Verizon lines, so the latency is terrible. Maybe that's part of the problem, but when weather.com switched to running multiple ad loops, the weather loop page would reset and timeout -- then reload (starting with a whole new page of the ads) before we ever saw the first motion of the weather map.

We never got the content we came for!!!

So I don't go there any more. I go to a local TV station instead. I tried to notify weather.com, but they've isolated themselves very well from any feedback.

Re:ad networks

[hb253]

Use weather.gov. It's where all the weather sites and TV stations get their weather info. The big plus, no ads!

Re:ad networks

[Lumpy]

And most ad networks are slow as heck so they drastically slow down the loading of the pages. I adblock to make he internet feel like it should.

Re:ad networks

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Or they could sell subscriptions (to readers) and syndication rights (to other newspapers, and aggregators like Google). Presumably the original content has value. I'd be suspicious if the content was supposed valuable, but nobody but advertisers was actually willing to pay for it.

You mean syndicate to sites that present the content and slather it with their own ads? ;)

Re:ad networks

[lexman098]

Flashblock takes care of most animated ads. It's a shame people don't use that instead going full on adblock.

Re:ad networks

[shentino]

Indeed, who needs ad revenue when Uncle Sam's paying for it with taxes?

Re:ad networks

[volmtech]

justweather dot com. Try it.

Re:ad networks

[ex01]

Huh? a section of the US government that hasn't been privatised yet?
Get on it!
Trickle down weather!

Re:ad networks

[sysrammer]

Indeed, who needs ad revenue when Uncle Sam's paying for it with taxes?

Absolutely. Since the gov needs to have good meteorological forecasts for military operations, it only makes sense for them to release to the public, since, as you say, we're paying for it anyways.

Re:ad networks

[Hyvtti]

Let me know how http://www.foreca.com/ works for you.

People want better ads.

[DCFC]

Readers block your ads because they are crap.

Your advertisers only want to reach people that are useful to them.
Cross the two.
Facebook et al try to steal personal data, why not negotiate with users ?
Treat them like adults, say “you are going to get one ad per 5 page views, so why not tell us what sort of ad you want ?”. I care about storage, you probably don’t, so why not honestly ask the readers ? You’d have a higher quality product to sell and readers would be bugged less.

Also, make a virtue about only having non-irritating ads and be honest that having the ad pays for the content, so that people ad your site to their exception list.

The thing I hate about most ads is that their server slows down your page load, that's fixable, and would cause a lot less use of blockers.

Re:People want better ads.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, readers block ads because they're capable of researching what they want on their own and don't want more crap foisted on them.

There is no such thing as a good advert to me. Adverts are inherently daft.

Re:People want better ads.

[Goaway]

No, people block your ads because somebody else had annoying ads that made them install an adblocker that blocks everything, no matter what. Good luck dealing with that.

If you are an honest person, then here's how you deal with annoying ads: Stop going to that site.

Re:People want better ads.

[grumbel]

Yep, very much this. It always puzzles me why ads are so crappy on the Internet. Every website these days has all those Web2.0 features, yet ads are still completely passive, I can't rate them, I can't comment on them, I can't even link them and even when I click them they hardly ever lead me to the information about the product I actually seek. What also annoys me a lot is the lack of variety in ads, if I open three tabs on Youtube, chances are they will all play the very same commercial and often one that I already have seen five times before the same day. And finally after all that hubbub about user tracking I have to wonder why ads are still so often so random and out of context, the very best that I have seen so far is that Amazon keeps advertising me products that I already bought the day before, which not very helpful to say the least.

It also would help a lot when companies would be a litter more active in interacting with their user base. For example when it comes to customer product reviews there are frequently persistent issues with the product, stuff that breaks, bad documentation or whatever, where is the company support guy actually answering those issues? The only times I ever the active support is from indie game developers, everybody else either doesn't interact with the customers at all or only via generic copy&paste text snipes that completely fail to actually address the issue.

Re:People want better ads.

[Electricity Likes Me]

No, readers block ads because they're capable of researching what they want on their own and don't want more crap foisted on them.

There is no such thing as a good advert to me. Adverts are inherently daft.

No the problem is advertisers will never not show you an ad. Anyone talking about demographic targeting never talks about this: they have no thresholds. They won't not show you an ad if they don't think you're interested, they'll instead move to the lowest common (usually seediest) denominator.

It's why everyone talking about Facebook ad-targeting has ultimately seemed laughable to me: the question as always has been "will Facebook not show you an ad if you don't match closely enough to an advertiser?"

Re:People want better ads.

[Robadob]

Not even this one? http://i.imgur.com/PDKKIM8.jpg I would never actually buy train simulator 2012 but I did give me and a few friends a good laugh.

Re:People want better ads.

[AlabamaCajun]

So true. I see so many internet ads that are as bad as those singing commercials on TV (you know the ones that sound like kids do on a portable tape recorder in the back yard).
1) Ads should not move or play music unless you are on a video channel. I'm paying for the band width, I won't click on the annoying thing in the first place and will more than likely close the whole sire after I see it. Dancing or shaking credit cards is about as stupid as selling snowballs in Antarctica.
2) Content of the ads should remain near the content of the site if possible. XBitLabs is a good example of a site that uses quality ads that follow it's content. 90% of my time on the net is research and I rarely buy from push advertisement. Influential works for me as I may see a great computer case and note where I last saw one.
3) Slide shows including non-advertisement (this runs in java and is hard to eliminate). I block the whole site if I see this ANNOYING CRAP. Many sites must have caught on and stopped using it as I close less sites than a year ago. That motion deflects off the motor cortex response system causing adrenalin leakage.
I have started opening my ad blocker on sites like SlashDot and XBit labs and other places I spend time on. In will also visit one if it has some interest. Still purchases only happen when I type in the URL so the ad is info only to me.

Re:People want better ads.

[BasilBrush]

There is nothing dishonest about using an ad-blocker. There's no law that says you have to download the ads attached to a web page. There's nothing on the supposed tablets of stone that Moses brought off the mountain. There's no value system anywhere that says you should.

That the advertisers and the web site owner want you to, doesn't make it dishonest not to.

Re:People want better ads.

[houghi]

People want better ads? No. People do not want ads, But if they are forced to chooses between two evils, they will chooses the less evil one.
In this case that is better ads.
Sure, sometimes the ads are better then the content (Superbowl anybody?) but that does not mean I want to watch ads all the time.
Soa Paulo in Brazil does not have any ads anymore.
I would be happy if all cities in the world would follow their example.

Banksy has a nice idea about it:
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.

Re:People want better ads.

[Anonymous Coward]

With Google ads I changed the type I was getting by going into their settings and it changed a LOT of web sites. I said I preferred to get fashion ads as opposed to computer parts and gun armour (Research for work triggered this - working on a fps). Now I get pictures of women in skimpy dresses that are only $3000 dollars. Much nicer to look at.

Re:People want better ads.

[joebagodonuts]

This I like. "You owe companies nothing".

Re:People want better ads.

[Anonymous Coward]

Part of the problem is that your interest in ads is very dynamic. The other is that ads are by definition trying to break your established habits.

Example: If you just ran out of floss, you'll be going out tomorrow to buy some more.
1. The floss ads are relevant to you today, not tomorrow, and not yesterday.
2. You have your favorite brand and type of floss, so ads that are trying to sell you other brands/types of floss are mostly just annoying you although, they might actually serve some purpose in a sense of educating you about a potentially better product.

Let's say that ads address point #1 at least and become 100% time-relevant. This leads to a world where if you run out of floss, you'll most likely be inundated with floss ads. So, here comes this:
3. Ultimately you'll pick one (1) floss at the store. There maybe three dozen brands/types of floss competing for this money. You're annoyed because you see ads as mostly useless, since you'll go with 1 out of 30 or 50 advertised products, so the rest of the ad time and/or online space seems completely wasted.

Finally, the really annoying part about ads to a lot of people is the fact that they bring very little actual information about the product. A lot of people want to see a black-on-white comparison of various products, so they can rank their features and compare the price. Ads avoid that like fire. They want to sell you one killer feature of the product so you end up buying the whole package because of that one thing that is the most important. That's how ads work.
- Progressive? Name your own price.
- State Farm? We have agents everywhere.
- Geico? Save money.
- AT&T? Fastest wireless.
- Verizon? Best coverage.
and so on.
(actually, a lot of IT ads are very stupid when it comes down to that - they are enigmatic and ambiguous - they mostly try to sell a brand, not a product - see Microsoft or IBM ads - because their products are too complicated to show in a 15 second ad in any sort of relevant fashion).

Captcha: speech

Re:People want better ads.

[Tom]

so why not honestly ask the readers ?

Because marketing people live in a different world than you. They think that you want things that you don't know that you want and their job is to make you realize it.

Or, to sell you crap you don't need by appealing to lower instincts and manipulation. Same thing, basically.

Re:People want better ads.

[marcosdumay]

People want better ads? No. People do not want ads

Speak for youself here. I often like ads, and look for them. (Too bad I won't ever see those intrusive ads on websites, but I do like to see new interesting products at the sites that won't have intrusive ads - like this one - and have the opinion that Goggle ads - at the search page - are extremely usefull.)

Soa Paulo in Brazil does not have any ads anymore

It's "São Paulo". And it's about keeping the city clean, not about disliking ads. Visual polution is a serious problem in a public space, but web sites are private space, thus the rules are different for them.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

No they don't. At least not in most of the world. It may be true at your place, but please, don't generalise it.

Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours.

As I said, web sites are private space. Both the server and the client are private properties, and shouldn't need to care about what should or should not be done in a public space when creating/rendering the page.

You owe the companies nothing.

And that is the first thing that you said that I completely agree.

Re:People want better ads.

[Ironchew]

web sites are private space, thus the rules are different for them.

The servers the sites are hosted on are typically private, but the information they send out over public infrastructure (the internet) is public speech. The client is not forced to listen to and process all that data, luckily, because some of it can be malicious. Likewise, the client doesn't have to request the loading of an ad just because the source code of the page recommends it.

Both the server and the client are private properties, and shouldn't need to care about what should or should not be done in a public space when creating/rendering the page.

The freedom of the client to choose what it wants to process supersedes the content provider's desire to render the page a certain way. Flipping that on its head would only be disastrous for internet users.

Re:People want better ads.

[Tooke]

What also annoys me a lot is the lack of variety in ads, if I open three tabs on Youtube, chances are they will all play the very same commercial and often one that I already have seen five times before the same day.

This really bugs me. I'll be listening to Pandora and they'll cycle between just 2 or 3 ads. Do they think that repeating ads is going to make them more effective? Maybe to a degree, but it starts to get really annoying to listen to the same crap over and over again (same goes for the music, but that's a different rant).

Re:People want better ads.

[BTWR]

There's no value system anywhere that says you should.

I'll correct your typo for you: There's no value system that says you should [except the value system set up by the site owner who pays his writers to post. But I have a really great reason why that value system is stupid, so I will declare it doesn't exist. I may have a point, I may not, but I will deny that the website owners have a value system. Therefore, is it a correct statement to say "There's no value system anywhere that says you should."].

Re:People want better ads.

[Common Joe]

Yep, very much this. It always puzzles me why ads are so crappy on the Internet. Every website these days has all those Web2.0 features, yet ads are still completely passive, I can't rate them, I can't comment on them, I can't even link them and even when I click them they hardly ever lead me to the information about the product I actually seek.

And while we're tailoring ads, if I want to see ads for porn or my wife and I decide to buy some kinky stuff, I don't want ads for that kind of stuff shown when my church going neighbor and his twelve year old daughter come over and look at something on my computer. It needs to be flexible enough to come around when I want it too.

Re:People want better ads.

[BasilBrush]

except the value system set up by the site owner who pays his writers to post

That's not a value system, it's a business model. And without anything to make it happen, possibly a flawed one.

Re:People want better ads.

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for an ad network. And I can tell you, the slashdot crowd, including myself, is not really the target market for ads. The ad networks know that the slashdot crowd runs ad blockers and that even if you don't run an ad blocker that you won't click or buy anyway.

As an ad network we are a middle man, we don't create the sites and we don't create the ads - we bring advertisers and sites together. This puts us in the position of seeing which ads get the best response on which sites. We tend to find that the some of the more annoying ads actually get a better response - those of us in Engineering are always surprised when a low quality ad is doing well. Why is it that one of our best performing (on not slashdot type sites) ads is a shaky ad for a weightloss product? Because someone out there is clicking and buying. This is the same reason that we have so much spam email, because someone is buying.

If you want better quality ads then convince your non-slashdot reading friends/family/associates to stop responding to low quality ads. As long as low quality or shaky, flashy, audio, generally annoying ads are working then you will continue to see them.

Understand that very few advertisers are trying to find slashdotters using poor quality ads (or at all for that matter). Feel free to block ads, we know you aren't buying anyway.

It's not the ads

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

For the most part it's not the ads. If they're not blinking or obnoxious I can live with them.

It's the tracking intrinsic to the ads that are the problem.

Use a service that allows you to host the ads on your own servers, so that I know the only person collecting my data is the site that I'm visiting.

Re:It's not the ads

[ebonum]

Mod up parent.

It's being tracked that freaks techies out. Not the ads.

Re:It's not the ads

[White Flame]

It's also a security risk. Anybody can effectively pay a few bucks to have their active content downloaded and run on users of a giant network of ad hosting sites.

If ads were limited to images (and even then there have been some attack vectors against file decoders) or text, this wouldn't be as insidious a problem.

Re:It's not the ads

[userw014]

Agreed. I don't trust ad networks to not deliver zero-day attacks against my workstations, and the add networks speed up the process of delivering such attacks so much that it's only sensible to do what I can to block them.

That's not to say that a model where ads being delivered through the site wouldn't suffer from a similar lack of review - if anything, you can argue that concentrating the skills and experience to vet ads with specialists would make them more secure than scattering the work among a gazillion part-time website owners. But the increased demands on the site for distributing the ads (in terms of bandwidth, etc.) would encourage the website owners to put more pressure on the ad networks to perform due diligence.

Re:It's not the ads

[hedwards]

Yeah, you can block that, but it's a lot harder to block. I personally block random ads because I don't trust the security of random 3rd parties to do the right thing. And that ultimately means that I don't see very many ads.

The fact that so many sites will also serve Flash ads that randomly obscure text to trick me into clicking on it or set the entire back ground to be a huge link without mentioning it, just makes me want to hurt those scumbags. Really, there's very little difference between the scum that spam and advertisers in general, they seem to have no understanding of how pissed people get by product placements and being tricked into buying something that will never perform as advertised.

Re:It's not the ads

[Greyfox]

You don't even need a plug-in for chrome or firefox to whitelist some site sites for cookies and drop all others when your session ends. IIRC you do need a plug-in to remove persistent data stored with flash. Or run flashblock and don't allow most sites to run flash on your browser.

Re:It's not the ads

[Xipher]

I don't know if any advertiser would ever do this, and if they did those ads wouldn't make the site jack squat for money because they are almost worthless to the advertisers. The data the advertisers collect is probably the most valuable part of the advertising.

Re:It's not the ads

[Dahamma]

Not only that, if they host the ads on their server it's impossible to block them, because the ad blockers won't be able to separate them from the actual content. I don't know why server-side ad insertion isn't more popular if sites are really that worried about this.

Of course, there is no reason they can't still track you on the server side, it jut requires a different mechanism to do the tracking (with more support from the content site, of course).

Re:It's not the ads

[Tom]

AdBlock won't help you against the current tracking schemes that have been coming to market for the past year or so. They will get you.

I signed an NDA, so I can't go into details. But they will almost certainly (70-90% are usual rates) even with AdBlock, Ghostery and NoScript.

Re:It's not the ads

[bds1986]

What infuriates me even more than the blinking ads are websites that have the tracking scripts embedded in such a way that they break page functionality if they are blocked.

I block most of the major ad networks at the DNS level, but I've increasingly found that doing so breaks a number of major sites that use these networks for analytics purposes. Blocking the marketing network "2o7.net" (run by these guys) stops links on Apple's website from working (unblocking the provider and flushing my cache resolves the issue). Other networks break my bank's website (I think I need to change banks) and some airlines in a similar fashion. There's plenty more out there.

I'm sorry if I'm making things rough on ad-supported sites, but I'm not willing to have Apple and my bank track my way around the internet so that a few blogs can serve up ads uninterrupted.

Things have changed?

[vidarlo]

Ad blocking came about as a reaction on the huge multimegabyte flash ads with sound and moving images - at least for my part. They were slow to download on 56k modem, and waste of space. Then, google started tracking me across sites using google ads, and I don't particularly want them to track my browsing habits. So I blocked that too. But how much is lost to blocked ads? Did the people blocking ads click ads before blocking was common? I did certainly not. Also, a lot of the ads on the web is quite US-centric, and of less interest to me as a european. Is this really a loss? I'm not so sure. Maybe a clean advertising standard, with text ads and as little tracking as possible would be a better way to go?

Re:Things have changed?

[uffe_nordholm]

I agree exactly with you: I will tolerate non-moving ads if the delivery of the ads is such that I will not be tracked.

But quite honestly, I don't really see why the advertising community (and those that get money from it) is making a fuss. I can take myself as an example: when I watch the TV and the ads come on, I either change the channel or go and do something other than watch the TV. Thus all the advertising broadcast by the TV-channel I was watching is, in essence, blocked by me. The mechanism is different to that I use on my computer, but the end result is still that I don't see the advertising. What is so different?

Re:Things have changed?

[White Flame]

Ads aren't just for click-through. Advertisers also want their product simply displayed and put into the minds of websurfers, so technically they are losing that form of audience when adblocking is enabled. Yeah, many of the products won't be applicable for out-of-country users, but they still might want to show their ads to local people who would never even click through.

But it's my bandwidth I pay for, it's my machine to decide what runs on it, and my choice whether to ignore sites that prevent adblocked users.

Re:Things have changed?

[corychristison]

I have zero problems with static image ads. So long as they aren't popping up in popup windows (or "modal" windows).

I think in this specific case, the problem lies in the fact that they use an Advertising network.

Any targeted news site isn't worth their salt if they can't do the leg work to obtain their own advertisers and cut their own deals.

A few things would come of this, if they went this route:
1) Not having to share profits with the ad network
2) Ads served from their own domain, making adblock not work out of the box (ad networks are preconfigured).
3) Better targeted ads
4) hopefully higher quality ads, as the company itself would select the ads.

Hopefully they would know to put the ad images in the same folder as their content or website structure images. Also don't use Javascript. Use PHP or other server side language to rotate and manage them.

Just my two cents.

Re:Things have changed?

[sort uniq]

This. It's the one of the concepts discussed not too long ago about Yellow Pages in Seattle

(Anecdotal, so YMMV) Most ads agencies pay those who show their ads on two metrics: a click based vector and an impression vector. Clicks are fairly intuitive. For every click, you are paid the "Cost per Click" rate. If you see an ad for Joe's Hambergers while browsing your favorite site, you may remember it the next time you're looking for some good eats, even if you didn't click on the link. The ad is still effective and this is where impressions come into play. The impressions rate is meant to fill in the gap for those of us that see the ads but don't click. While I haven't seen as much revenue from impressions as from clicks (differing rates, search for eCPM for more info), for a highly trafficked ads space, impressions can yield hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

That said, I do run adblock, but I have donated money to a couple favorite sites via paypal. I wish all site had this option.

Re:Things have changed?

[mellyra]

What is so different?

It isn't - which is why TV stations started to display ads as overlays during the regular programming and do "just 30 seconds" ad blocks that are too short for you to change the channel.

Re:Things have changed?

[NicBenjamin]

The difference is that the internet advertiser knows he's being blocked, therefore he refuses to pay the content creator.

Which means adblock screws Destructoid, but channel-surfing actually helps ESPN because you'll surf to ESPN2 and their advertisers for both channels will pay for your eyeballs.

Just tell your users what is happening

[cgimusic]

I block all ads by default but if the ads are non-intrusive (non-flash and don't constantly reload every 10 seconds) then I am happy to whitelist certain sites I frequent. Just by making the assurance that the ads are non-intrusive may well reduce the number of users that ad block.

Re:Just tell your users what is happening

[rgbrenner]

1) that is exactly what the article is doing, and 2) he tried appealing to the users, and only 2.5% disabled ad blocking.

This is all in the article.

Re:Just tell your users what is happening

[vidarlo]

The problem is that they still track you. For me, this is a show stopper; I do not want Google to track me in this fashion.

Doubleclick was marginally better in this regard, because they could only track me anonymously, but Google has my name and address already, so they can easily track me from a gmail session to surfing habits, if they want. By making anonymous ads commonplace, I'd stop blocking text ads

Another concern is that advertising has a cost. We spend huge resources on advertising, and what is the gain? If sites started enforcing more rigorous rules for advertising content, like no flash, not tracking me across sites and so on, maybe I'd not be so inclined to block ads? In short; keep the ads as a business model, but adapt it to those who don't like tracking. A static image with a link in the html of the page? I would probably not bother to block it. A text paragraph, statically in the HTML, and not loaded via JS like google ads? I'd do nothing about it.

Re:Just tell your users what is happening

[White Flame]

It's far easier for a user to just take the shotgun approach and block everything than to manually cater to individual sites, even if they're otherwise supportive.

Also, lots of people have IT-savvy friends help out with their machine, so they end up with adblockers they have no clue how to configure, or even perceive that blocking is taking place.

Re:Just tell your users what is happening

[ATMAvatar]

Unless destructoid reverted any changes they made, I call bullshit.

Curious to see what the big deal was, I visited the article without adblock on.

When I clicked the article link, I was presented with one of the more annoying types of ads - the kind that takes over the screen and force you to click a link to go to the actual page I wanted. When I finally got to the article, there were no fewer than three animated flash ads that appeared, and there was a sprinkling of additional ads as I kept reading.

Worse yet: the manner in which cross-links to other destructoid articles is presented on the right is not significantly different than the ads, so to the uninitiated, it looks like the entire right 1/3 of the page is filled with ads.

Re:Just tell your users what is happening

[Lonewolf666]

If so, he should not have too much problems with me (ignoring for a moment that I'm not a regular on his site).
I'm currently doing two things to curb excessively annoying ads and tracking:
1) I have installed the NoScript add-on in SeaMonkey, which makes running JavaScript opt-in on a per website basis. That tends to kill JavaScript driven ads, as I will allow JavaScript only to the extent needed to see the content I'm interested in.
2) I tell my browser not to accept third-party cookies.

So if a web site serves ads as HTML content in some kind of side bar, it will most likely not be blocked by my setup. Annoying scripts that plaster popups all over the content, however, will be stopped. If a web site operator has a problem with that, so be it.

Ghostery hit an all time high score.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been running Ghostery for a while for this reason, and going to Destructoid it hit an all time high score of blocked content. 43 items blocked, even News Limited's news.com.au only gets 10 blocks and there is enough crap on there to annoy the hell out of most people.

http://i.imgur.com/a6gWxbN.jpg

Re:Ghostery hit an all time high score.

[thetoadwarrior]

Not all of that is for advertising (like twitter) and while I understand why people wouldn't want to be tracked via non-advertising means you should expect some level of tracking with ads and you can do away with most of it with removing cookies. There has always been some sort of tracking with ads. I don't mind that. What annoys me are ads that have nothing to do with me. Ads showing fat women's guts promising weight loss or that awful ad with the old lady peeling the wrinkle removing thing off her face and making a ridiculous claim that this 50+ year old woman will look in her 20's. Or all the teeth whitening ones. Destructiod at least has fairly relevant ads unlike a lot of sites.

Sites with ads that assume they only have American visitors are the worst. I get the impression being fat, wrinkly and not having perfect teeth is the biggest fear to Americans.

Re:Ghostery hit an all time high score.

[Teun]

You are on your own, fix it.

Re:Ghostery hit an all time high score.

[myrikhan]

Out of curiosity I went to the site. My initial impression wasn't good.

Time it took for the site to appear: 43 seconds
Time it took for the site to fully load: 80 seconds

I didn't bookmark it.

Do you really need ad-supported websites?

[louic]

I don't see the problem. Actually, I would be happy to see all those ad-supported websites disappear (especially those that make you click through 10 pages to read a single article). If the internet were to become a place where enthusiasts write their weblogs, scientists and hobbyists share results, and some really good content that is worth paying for hides behind paywalls, I do not have a problem with that at all. In fact, it would be a brilliant improvement!

Re:Do you really need ad-supported websites?

[Cederic]

There's some really great free content and services out there. However, most of my favourite sites go back to the days before financial exploitation, or are ones I'm paying for already.

So on the whole I think I agree. Lets kill off all ad-supported sites. Except Youtube.

Re:Do you really need ad-supported websites?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny to see you posting this on Slashdot, of all places, which is an ad-supported site, and for which much of the front page is links to other ad supported sites.
Who needs ad supported sites? Clearly YOU do, or you wouldn't be here going through the effort of making a post.

Re:Do you really need ad-supported websites?

[tepples]

If the internet were to become a place where enthusiasts write their weblogs

Who would pay for their hosting?

Re:Do you really need ad-supported websites?

[Anonymous Coward]

They would pay for it out of their own pocket, and accept it as a cost of a hobby they enjoy.

Re:Do you really need ad-supported websites?

[drinkypoo]

Who would pay for their hosting?

Anyone who cannot afford $30/year or convince someone to host their blog for them for free because it is interesting does not need a blog. namecheap (or whoever) plus nosupportlinuxhosting equals under thirty dollars a year. Just made the switch.

Re:Do you really need ad-supported websites?

[ccguy]

Who would pay for their hosting?

Anyone who cannot afford $30/year or convince someone to host their blog for them for free because it is interesting does not need a blog.

Really? So only people with a proper job with Western salaries are allowed to blog now?

Re:Do you really need ad-supported websites?

[drinkypoo]

Anyone who cannot afford $30/year or convince someone to host their blog for them for free because it is interesting does not need a blog.

Really? So only people with a proper job with Western salaries are allowed to blog now?

Unfortunately, people with a total lack of reading comprehension are still permitted to post to slashdot. Try reading, it helps.

Re:Do you really need ad-supported websites?

[PlusFiveTroll]

Who would pay for their hosting?

Our current crop of crap blog software would die. And good riddens. Turn on MySQL query logging and load one page on Wordpress, ugh, and if that's not bad enough look at the 500k of crap it dumps out, and that's even if they have mod_gzip or the like turned on their server.

If the owners had to pay for their bandwidth they'd think about optimizing what they are doing much more thoroughly.

Re:Do you really need ad-supported websites?

[DrJimbo]

Our current crop of crap blog software would die. And good riddens.

Many riddens died ...

Re:Do you really need ad-supported websites?

[0111 1110]

If I had to pay slashdot even $1 a month, I would be happy to stop coming here. Of course slashdot gives me the option to turn off the ads that I never even realized existed, but if they didn't and I couldn't block them I would just go do something else with my time. Probably something a hell of a lot more productive than reading or posting on slashdot.

Re:Do you really need ad-supported websites?

[Spykk]

If the internet were to become a place where enthusiasts write their weblogs, scientists and hobbyists share results, and some really good content that is worth paying for hides behind paywalls, I do not have a problem with that at all.

The internet still is that place. I can't speak for everyone, but when I go looking for information on the internet I almost always find it on a site like Stack Overflow or Wikipedia where the content is all generated by enthusiasts sharing their expertise. There are certainly plenty of superficial sites designed to glean a quick buck from SEO, but it doesn't take long to learn how to differentiate them from sites with real content.

Re:Do you really need ad-supported websites?

[Pseudonym Authority]

Please tell me how enthusiasm can put food on the table. Please use small words and speak slowly, I'm not bright enough to figure it out.

Re:Do you really need ad-supported websites?

[tepples]

Or ISP provided webspace, I've seen a lot of that.

The last time I tried personal web space that ISPs provide at no additional charge, it had four key drawbacks. First, no CGI or other server-side processing was allowed; it was for static pages only, and some ISPs even failed to enable server-side includes to establish a common header and footer. Second, I remember a lot of these being limited to single- or double-digit megabytes of storage; good luck fitting video. Third, HTML storage APIs such as cookies and IndexedDB isolate one origin (scheme, host, and port) from another, but they don't isolate path prefixes within an origin. http://home.example.com/~someone_else/ can view and modify resources created by http://home.example.com/~you/. And finally, cool URIs don't change. I haven't seen an ISP that provides for forwarding of bookmarked URLs once the user changes ISPs, such as by moving to a city served by a different ISP.

Re:Do you really need ad-supported websites?

[yenic]

False. If everyone blocked ads and Slashdot died, an enthusiast created replacement would come about. Many people have noted sensationalism becoming more and more the trend for Slashdot, this is due to the necessity for hits/ads.

As the old way dies, another would take its place. You don't have to worry about that, and the quality will increase as it's for passion, not profit.

Re:Do you really need ad-supported websites?

[Trogre]

You'd be happy to see Google, Facebook and Slashdot disappear?

How much $$$

[jamesh]

How much money would I have to pay to balance out my blocked ads? TFA doesn't seem to say, but it's kind of all over the place so I just skimmed it.

Sack Jim Sterling

[Teknikal69]

It's the only viable solution, in return we will all switch off our adblockers.

I wonder why...

[Gadget_Guy]

Advertisers really only have themselves to blame. Huge-sized, CPU intensive Flash ads with jarringly annoying video & sound and which track you across different websites are extremely annoying. As ads get more intrusive, is it any wonder that so many people resort to ad blocking technology?

It is true that in the early days of simple banner ads that some people still blocked them. You are always going to get some freeloaders who block even text only Google ads, but it wouldn't be such a high proportion of viewers if ads were a bit more reasonable. I have always browsed without Flash (or at least with it disabled), and I always turn off GIF animations because I like stable web pages that don't give me a headache. But where ever possible I prefer to show ads to support the sites I use (I don't disable ads on this site). I have even been known to click on them and look at the advertised goods when they are of interest.

However, I would never support an advertiser or the hosting website that makes ads that look like they are legitimate parts of the website (eg. an ad with a big button saying "Download" on a freeware file hosting site). I will always disable sites that track where I browse (oh look, the linked article uses DoubleClick advertising). Be reasonable to your audience and enough of them will be reasonable back. It is not rocket science.

Re:I wonder why...

[Megane]

Remember the good old days when stuff was "sponsored by" companies?

Now they don't care about anything else but getting in your face and screaming and shaking at you. And if that wasn't bad enough, even the sites themselves are using annoying sidebar headline rotators and pop-outs.

Re:I wonder why...

[PlusFiveTroll]

Advertisers really only have themselves to blame.

This right here. No quality control, what so ever. Ad companies seemingly let any ad on to their network AND they allow the websites splash them everywhere. Being advertisers you'd think they'd know what 'Reputation Management' is.

In 'the real world' most people just don't watch Infomercials, but the internet isn't a good fit in comparison. Blocking one station on TV doesn't stop the same add on another station, but blocking *.doubleclick.net blocks it on all internet sites.

In an odd way, ads are like DRM, they keep you from getting the product for free, but like most DRM the people with the best usage experience are the ones who remove it.

Ask Penny Arcade

[trout007]

They had a kickstarter and put a target up up remove all ads.

Team up with AdBlock - they'll help you out.

[devitto]

AdBlock has a scheme where if your Ads are place sympathetically, they're not blocked.

But this article (and TFA) reads as 'We don't understand or communicate with our readers, but this is somehow THEIR fault.'

Re:Team up with AdBlock - they'll help you out.

[sandytaru]

There's also the fact that it doesn't seem as though they even asked their readers to unblock content before it came to this point. Many web comics I read have specifically asked their readers to unblock ads, and have guaranteed they have clean ads that contain no malware. They also have a mechanism to report inappropriate ads (for example, stuff with adult content in it) and have point blank told us that clicking through an ad gets them more money, so if it's something interesting, go ahead and click.

Internet advertising is no longer a lazy man's free money pit. You have to be actively involved in the advertising process if you want it to really work. Too many people hit the "Monetize" button on Google Sites or Blogger and expect to get rich quick.

Plead

[Kjella]

People didn't install ad blockers to block your site specifically, they did it once because of some annoying ads or just the vast volume of ads everywhere. They don't really think about the fact that they're doing it and depriving you of ad revenue. I would make a box one pixel higher/wider than the ad (since many blocks are based on standard ad sizes in addition to lists) with a background that said something like "[website name] is funded by ad revenue. If you like the content you find here, please do not block our ads. Thank you." so that if you have no ad blocker installed the ad loads on top. If you block the ad they get that message instead. Start there, only take more drastic measures if you have to.

Re:Plead

[DaveGod]

Is it practical to have ads coming from your own domain?

Myself and I assume many others, blacklist the likes of "ad.doubleclick.net". On sites I like, maybe I'll get around to whitelisting it on that page, but maybe not since I don't really want doubleclick tracking me. But when your ads are coming from the sites own domain then I'll have to be purposefully making the effort to block those ads; if they are not obnoxious I probably wont.

While you are at it, avoid having the likes of /adserver/ and /banner/ in the address.

Re:Plead

[DaveGod]

Forgot to mention that by running noscript, people like me are automatically blocking any adserving coming in externally, again unless we make the effort to whitelist it.

Re:Plead

[Kjella]

Myself and I assume many others, blacklist the likes of "ad.doubleclick.net". On sites I like, maybe I'll get around to whitelisting it on that page, but maybe not since I don't really want doubleclick tracking me.

I don't know how easy it'd be to set up, but it is clearly possible to allow the ads images through but block any kind of tracking cookies. For example by setting that globally in the browser, even though the site is whitelisted.

Re:Plead

[Megane]

Except all you're doing is shaming people into re-enabling those annoying ads. When I use adblock, I block the ad site itself for being the source of the annoying crap. If they don't have ads that annoy me, then I won't take the effort to block them.

Re:Plead

[Skapare]

I block ad NETWORK sites because there is always lots of trouble at those places. Insert your OWN ads and we'll see how that goes.

Re:Plead

[Pentium100]

I don't know how easy it'd be to set up, but it is clearly possible to allow the ads images through but block any kind of tracking cookies.

IP could be used for tracking just as well. Each site has a unique link to the ad provider (otherwise how would the ad provider know which site is displaying the ad) and the logs would show my IP accessing "ad.php?site=example.com" and "ad.php?site=example2.com".

Now, this is not as precise as with cookies (since it could be someone else behind my NAT accessing the other site, but at least it narrows it down to the internet connection, if it doesn't point to a specific person. It also does not work if you are behind carrier grade NAT, but those are uncommon (at least in my country only the cell phone providers use it, all wired ones and some wireless ones provide external IPs).

Re:Plead

[guardian-ct]

Advertisers know that some people block cookies, and the obvious way around that is to put tracking info in the image request. So the tracking images also need to be blocked to prevent tracking. Most of these tracking images have random-looking junk in the image link. That junk might, or might not, be some sort of tracking information, but it sure seems suspicious.

Blocking only tracking cookies will not stop tracking.

And a big chunk of the other 50% ...

[dbIII]

And a big chunk of the other 50% probably just ignore them and block them out mentally.

Better delivery mechanisms!

[Myu]

I use a popup blocker, a flash blocker and Mozilla's "Do not track" feature. I don't mind if your webpage has advertisements at the side of the page or if I need to click through a brief commercial message after 5 seconds to get to the content I want to see, but stop throwing flashy movies at me, creating new windows and watching where I'm surfing. These are the tools of malware authors! I shouldn't have to make myself vulnerable to abuse just to help keep your website up and running.

Payola for the content

[alen]

Have the game publishers pay for good reviews

Site gets money
Readers get content

Some sites spoil it for everybody

[putaro]

I ran without an adblocker for the longest time because the ads on the side don't bother me. Even the occasional interstitial I could deal with. Then, one of the sites I visit regularly started running that damned Meebo toolbar that manages to cover part of whatever you're looking at. It looks like it's been fixed but for a while it repopped up on every page you went to on the site. So, I installed an adblocker, and I've been a happy camper ever since. I don't even think about it running anymore.

This is sad for the sites who have not been annoying with their ads. However, even those sites that want to keep the ads under control apparently have trouble. The writer at Destructoid said that they try to keep the annoying ads out, like the ones that start running audio as soon as you open the page. Try is the operative word, though, and many other sites do not try, so it's always a possibility that something stupid will start blaring out of your speakers. The industry as a whole needs to stop looking at consumers as sheep to be milked instead of customers to be convinced.

People just don't want ads

[Anonymous Coward]

And no amount of begging or making ads "relevant" is going to change that. Not to try to put rose-tinted glasses on it, I remember when the internet before commercial interests took a hold, which consisted of mostly academia, and nobody made money off it - it was for the spread of information for the benefit (or bewilderment) of everyone involved. It wasn't a huge commercial success, because not everyone measures success by how much money you can make.

Nobody is stopping you selling real products on the internet, and if you have a service or information that people want to really *that* much then paywalling is an option. But don't kid yourself that you have a right to make money just by being "on the internet" somehow - when every single site and its dog is cannoned up to the gunwhales with advertisements, the value of said ads for any single site isn't going to be worth much to you, even when they're not blocked.

Perhaps if ads hadn't continued to dominate more and more of the content of an average website, and become more and more obnoxious, then nobody would have felt the need to create and use ad blockers. Now its too late - believe me, try using an ad blocker and you'll find that many of the large glossy sites look very, very sparse and lacking in real content indeed.

"But how will I support my site?" - I don't care, it's part of the natural evolution of these things, people get greedy when they see a way to make money, everyone jumps on the bandwagon, then the market collapses. It's always been this way and always will. Perhaps once a lot of ad-revenue supported sites have collapsed there will be a market (paywall or micropayment) for a small number of good quality sites (which presumably does not include the NYT), rather than the acres of glossy crap we have infesting the internet today.

Re:People just don't want ads

[Lincsman]

wish I'd kept my mod points, +1

It's not the ads. Its about not being tracked

[AndroSyn]

See here's the thing, I don't have problems with ads, per-se, I have problem with ads being served by third parties that also serve ads on thousands of other sites as well and track me from site to site. Serve up your ads from your own servers, under your own domain, then I'll see your ads just fine. But if you expect to show me ads that track me, you can go get bent.

Ask then nicely not to?

[Fuzzums]

One site I visit frequently gives me the option to see their ads or not.
I like that site and second, and they're very careful about how intrusive the ads are.
So I choose not to block them.

Re:use bitcoins

[Janek Kozicki]

oh, and of course the cost of Opening Post would directly go to the website earnings. While of course the OP would recap his initial payment from replies posted by other people.

Why I block ads

[LihTox]

I refuse to read ads. I refuse to click on ads. People trying to manipulate me piss me off, and now I'm reading your site and I'm pissed off. Ads are computer viruses for the mind (trying to rewrite the software to their own ends); if a website came to me and said "Don't install antivirus software because malware pays for our bandwidth" I would laugh in their faces and I hope you would too.

I'd be happy to load the ads if I didn't have to look at them. Perhaps I could have a special sandboxed browser where you type in all of your favorite sites, and it loads them up with the ads in the background every day (at 3am when I don't care about bandwidth).

But the real sin to advertisers isn't blocking the ads, it's ignoring them, right?

You ran bad ads.

[Anonymous Coward]

You and your peers ran annoying ads. So we blocked the hell out of them. There were 43 blocked items on your page when I visited it. To not get in the way, ads must be scriptless and not animated, and perhaps only text. You, on the other hand, run full-page interstitials and had to ASK your advertisers to not run ones that expand and stuff like that. Fuck that shit. You made your ads too annoying. You made a mistake.

Honestly, we won't cry if you do go out of business. We do not owe you a living. There are more than enough paid games journalists already, and there are plenty of very good amateur ones. And you're not top-tier like The Escapist or Angry Joe. If you take the route some are tempted by and try to block your site to those with ad-blockers, 50% of your readers will ignore you, and when the other 50% link to your site from the places traffic is driven and discover the other half can't see the site, they'll link somewhere else instead because there's no point sharing a site to someone who can't see it, the same issue sites which are geographically restricted face, and you'll fade into obscurity and go out of business. (Also, the next generation of ad-blockers will work around anti-ad-blocking scripts.)

Gamers are sometimes picky about who we give our money to. That will not always work in your favour. In short, what you need to do is suck it up and adapt. I don't know why your bandwidth costs so much, consider moving your hosting and reducing your costs. I'm able to run a site that gets way more traffic than yours without ads: hell I don't even ask for donations, and I'm not going to plug it here either. If your ads are no longer breaking even for you, you have a cashflow problem.

don' tell

[kwikrick]

the advertisers we use ad-blockers! Aw, now you've ruined it for all of us.

I block scripts not ads

[Nadaka]

I don't have a problem with a simple graphic banner across the top of your page if it does not flash or play sound or grab my mouse context or jump to the middle of the screen and do an overlay of something i am trying to click on or if there are so many of them i have to scroll to get to the content I am looking for.

If you want advertising revenue, go back to a single simple ad banner.

Re:I block scripts not ads

[Megane]

This. One site that I have never felt the need to block ads on is 4chan. And doing a quick check, I see that they are serving their ads from an in-domain server. They don't waggle at me. They don't shout at me. In fact, they sort of grow on you after a while because they really don't have too many different advertisers.

the customer/vendor relationship

[argStyopa]

I don't read Destructoid, but I read plenty of other gaming sites.

I run strict adblockers for the same reason pretty much everyone does: because the obtrusiveness of ads - popover, popunder, audible, garish, and intellitext ads all are simply annoying, not to say that some (scripts) are flat-out security risks.

The fact is - not as bad as broadcast TV, but close - the hook is too large for the bait. Few people understand the true relationship between viewers, content producers, and advertisers: the ADVERTISERS are the customers, the viewers are what are being sold, and the content producer is like a fisherman, throwing just enough bait (content) into the water to get the fish to swim closer (read the site and thus the adverts) to sell THAT to the customer.

50% of the users block ads? I think that's low, actually. I also put adblock on every computer in our family (it means less service work for me).

So, you ask, how is a site like Destructoid supposed to survive?
1) recognize that (contrary to the OP) you're NOT "working 2x as hard as anyone to survive"...everyone else's ads are blocked at the same rate.
2) you are in a market where there are a glut of suppliers because the entry-price is so low: a website is cheap to start and there are all sorts of budding writers that are simply happy to have their crap posted somewhere more official than their facebook page.. The sad fact of capitalism is that many of them will fail.
3) Sadly, whether you fail or not will probably have little to do with the quality of your content. Life's a crapshoot, and choosing a business with a zero-depth entry point means your business is going to be CONSTANTLY challenged by other people who think they can do it better. Further, it is overall a relatively puny business, something that a corporate giant (a Sony, or EA, or whatever) can 'blow' $$$ on with little/no hope of return, compensating writers more aggressively. The only thing you have to offer that beats that is neutrality - any corporate-sponsored site (if it's identifiable as such) is suspected of being biased in its reviews, or (at best) being a gross corporate shill (ala Game Informer magazine). But ultimately (as especially those of us having spent time in the industry know) you are hostage to your advertisers too. In point of fact, the agglomerated sites (Telefragged, etc.) are probably LESS hostage to a particular advertiser, although as I'm not sure how fast the zeroes pile up at that scale, I'm not certain that's true.

For what it's worth, there is no bad publicity; I'd never even heard of Destructoid having been in the gaming industry as a consumer and reviewer since 1994. I'll check out Destructoid for a while, see if it's worth reading.

I don't have any advice for you. If I could be certain that the ads provided through your ad-providers are never going to be minimally-obtrusive, sure, I' d suspend adblock on you pages. But I can't change the fact that your industry is easy to get into and you will always have lots and lots of competition...I doubt it will ever get easier for you.

Truth in commenting 1: I personally can't understand the advertising economy; the amounts paid for advertising seem to me staggeringly out of line for the benefit. I rarely watch/view ads, those I do see often dissuade as much as persuade, and I've never (as far as I can tell) made a purchasing choice based on an advert.
Truth in commenting 2: on Slashdot, I have deliberately left unchecked the 'disable adverts' box because I've never been annoyed at their ads; however, I don't make an adblock exception for them either.

Re:the customer/vendor relationship

[PlusFiveTroll]

Too bad you can't be modded to the top of the page on ./

Get on a plane and fly to where it is showing

[tepples]

video ads [...] for movies that i couldn't even legally see in my location!

They're ads for getting on a plane and flying to where the movie can be seen. Or maybe they're just ads for a movie that will eventually be released in your location, just as movies coming soon to theaters are advertised in the United States.

I block SWF and only SWF

[tepples]

Now i simply manually block ads with my hosts file only when they are particularly annoying (autoplaying videos? Whose great idea was it?).

I used to do that until I discovered the Flashblock extension. Now I block ads only when they're presented in SWF format. Chrome on my tablet doesn't even support SWF, and Firefox on my laptop and tablet makes SWF click-to-play except for a few sites on the whitelist. Text ads and still image ads still load just fine; an advertiser wanting to reach me should use those.

Re:I block SWF and only SWF

[lintux]

Yep, FlashBlock is all one needs.

This is why I'm very afraid of HTML5 and don't actually WANT Flash to die at all. It eliminates one trivial way to filter unwanted Internet content.

Re:I block SWF and only SWF

[dr2chase]

Another way (at least on a Mac) is that you uninstall Flash altogether, and use Chrome (has built-in Flash) for the sites where you really want to see some animation or movie.

Re:I block SWF and only SWF

[Hentes]

This. I use Flash on-demand, I only load the objects when I need them.

Re:I block SWF and only SWF

[drinkypoo]

Yep, FlashBlock is all one needs.

Well no, no it isn't. Not if that one is me. First, I'm on a 768k connection and I share it with another human. Second, blocking ad networks provides some protection from buffer overflow attacks, because that's where most of them come from. Third, blocking arbitrary scripts and ads provides most of the rest of that kind of protection that you need, since that's where most of the rest of them come from.

If all the websites that can't exist without ads died tomorrow, the internet would be a better place. Some sites that many people use would go away, and they would be replaced by a sampling of other sites that Google would eventually learn to index intelligently. The end result would be less bandwidth wasted on advertising. We call that a good thing.

I publicly shame a website every time I can't browse to it and view content with javascript and never ever share links to them, and if other people who are followed by many would do the same, that would also make the internet better.

Websites that can't exist without ads exist primarily to convey ads. I want to use sites that exist for other reasons, because sites that exist primarily to convey ads suck hairy monkey nuts, and not mine.

Re:I block SWF and only SWF

[Xarius]

It's trivial to block HTML5 tags that show multimedia content and works pretty much the same way you'd block Flash wholesale--just drop all and tags (or whatever they are) using the same mechanism

Re:I block SWF and only SWF

[thetoastman]

Yep, Flashblock is the way to go. Back when I had a lowly P4 with only 1.5 GB of ram (still have it as my XP browser test machine / Linux server), a Flash-heavy page would slow the computer to a crawl.

I don't mind non-intrusive ads. I don't even mind (too much) the more "content after the jump" ads. I'l even grudgingly put up with the "press skip to continue" ads. What I won't put up with are ads that cover the page, ads that play music, ads that have intrusive animation that I cannot control, and other interactive ads that I must interact with before viewing content (skip ads above excluded).

When I encounter such ads, the organization behind the web site, the advertising company (if I can figure out who produced the ad), and the company who's product is being advertised all get fairly acerbic letters from me. Repeat offenses mean I will not purchase or recommend those products, and will not visit those web sites. I let the three groups responsible know this as well.

I know, one person writing email to a PR / marketing drone in a large company does virtually nothing. I'm sure it probably does nothing other than generate a chuckle for people at an advertising agency. I think an advertising agency's entire business model is centered around being annoying.

Possibly many people writing would do something — I have seen fewer "take over your screen interactive flash ads" recently.

For the TL;DR crowd . . . I visit sites for the content, not your advertisements. Make the advertisements relevant to the content, my interests, and less the center of attention than the content. Do that, keep out the malware, and you might even get some clicks from me. Fail to do that, and I just won't visit a site, nor use the products you advertise.

Re:I block SWF and only SWF

[fa2k]

I figure there are lots of alternatives to sites with obnoxious ads. I stopped going to dictionary.com when they played an ad with sound, and I'm using merriam-webster.com instead (they have a rate limit on the searches, but I usually just need one). When wikipedia showed the huge donation banner that popped up and down while I was reading, I significantly reduced my use of Wikipedia. I have to admit I still go there quite a lot, but when there's another plausible link in the google results, e.g. Wolfram MathWorld, I usually click that instead. The only ads I mind are the ones that force me to interact with them (or if the frantically blink, etc.). I find about 0.001 % of the ads interesting enough to look closer at, and about half of them worthy of a click, so when an ad forces itself on me, there's a probability of ~1 of wasting my time. [When there's a full page ad with an option to "Skip this ad" I usually just look at something else instead of skipping it, I just don't want to interact with them]

Re:I block SWF and only SWF

[fa2k]

I now realise that my post was a bit off topic for this thread. I sometimes turn off Flash in the Firefox add-on manager, and turn it back on when I need it for a video, but the options posted in this thread seem much better.

Re:I block SWF and only SWF

[antdude]

I hope someone will make a HTML5 video blocker like FlashBlock. So far, I haven't seen one yet.

Destructoid should make a paid version with no ads for those who want to pay. Those who don't pay get ads (if they don't use an ad blocker).

Re:I block SWF and only SWF

[TheRaven64]

It's far from trivial. JavaScript code running animations in a canvas tag runs in the same context as all of the other JavaScript on a page. ActionScript controlling a Flash animation runs in a separate context. You can stop the entire Flash movie without any side effects on the rest of the page. Stopping an HTML5 canvas element may interfere with other JavaScript on the page, and will consume CPU (and battery) if you leave it active but simply not drawn.

Is Flashblock "blocking ads"?

[tepples]

And I do think that most gamers who frequent that said site have started unblocking ads on said site so that they can continue to enjoy the reviews and other content on the site.

If I am viewing a web site, but Flash is click to play on my machine and HTML5 video in MPEG-4 format is not available, am I "blocking ads"?

Re:Is Flashblock "blocking ads"?

[lexman098]

Who cares. They don't deserve the revenue for flash ads. I think most people with adblock would find that they can end up blocking 95% of the annoying ads with flashblock alone.

Because you don't pay, you just complain

[raymorris]

Ready answer - nectar the ones who complain are not willing to pay a dollar even for some of their favorite sites. Slashdot allows you to choose to turn off ads by paying. Something like 0.001% pay. 99.99% won't pay.

Some time ago I wrote a shareware program that does something no other software does. 100,000 people downloaded it. It got top ratings everywhere. About 60 people emailed me saying how much they like the software. Exactly ONE person paid the $5 "donation" for it. Web sites are like that - people will visit daily, they'll talk about how awesome the site is, but no way they'll fork over $1. They just don't.

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[DaveV1.0]

You really shouldn't be surprised about that. "Why should I pay if I can have it for free?" is the thinking of the day, and legality, ethics, and morals don't even enter into the thinking. If morals and ethics do enter into the thinking, it is immoral and/or unethical to want to make money off your work.

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[devent]

That's so much BS.
Try this: Go to a party, bring some wine and some cookies. Now put that on the table to everyone can drink and eat your wine and cookies. Now put a sign up: give me $5 for my trouble to bring wine and cookies to the party.

How many will pay? My guess is nobody. How many will drink and eat your wine and cookie? everybody.

The lesson learned? People will not pay if you offer the stuff for free.

They did not ask for wine and cookies. You brought them by yourself. Likewise nobody was asking you to write the Shareware. You did it on your own account. Also you offer the Shareware for free. Why should anybody pay you anything? You should be glad to get at least 5$ from one person. But to expect to be paid, it's just stupid.

You could just sell your app like any other product. Or you could ask people what they want and demand a payment up front. Projects on Kickstarter are a great success. Why? Because the developers are offer people a solution and ask them to pay for it.

You sound like an artist. Somebody who painted or sing a song or made a picture and now demands to be paid. I not asked you for your picture, if you are offering the picture for free to look fine. But do not demand or expect to be paid, just because you done something.

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[blahplusplus]

"Exactly ONE person paid the $5 "donation" for it."

Then you didn't do your marketing research. The idea that just because you make a program people will value it enough to pay for is laughable. There's plenty of programs people willingly pay for. If there wasn't no paid for apps would exist. You just happened to make software a paying audience didn't want.

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[sheetsda]

Slashdot allows you to choose to turn off ads by paying.

There is (was?) also an option to turn off ads for 'positive contributors' whatever that means. I'm having trouble finding it in the UI right now, maybe pissing off the Blizzard fanbois a couple weeks ago cost me that option. :)

Anyway, this positive contribution concept could certainly be extended to almost any bulletin board like system and perhaps generalized into something like the captchas that are used as a way to digitize books. Find some minuscule task that somebody is willing to pay for being done on a large scale and you've got a business model. Imagine a future where Amazon's cloud service becomes a P2P network made up of the computers of people offering up their electricity and idle cycles as a ticket to free internet content for example.

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course they don't "fork over $1", because what at first sounds like a cost of $1 to them is actually a huge cost in time, money and fraud potential just so you get $1.

Repeat your adventure, and this time publish it on Steam / App Store / whatever, where users don't have to bend over for what is essentially a micro-transaction.

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[ThurstonMoore]

I've worked since I was legally allowed to and I guaranty you I wouldn't be making more money if Romney was elected.

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[trylak]

Wow it's actually hard to figure out how to pay for a subscription on Slashdot even when you want to. No wonder that percentage is so low! I've logged in now, clicked through to the "Subscriptions" page on my account, all I see is gift subscription information and "You can buy a subscription for yourself or a gift subscription for another user. Payment options include PayPal and credit-card.". That's nice... how!?!?! Am I missing something obvious?

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[Cito]

yea I see the option checkbox to disable ads on slashdot

but I run adblock subscribed to 3 blocklists and never turn it off anyhow. Plus I run a greasemonkey script to auto fill in captchas which works for most all but the latest, it definitely works on youtube captchas when you comment too quickly.

also the blocklists I use keep ads on hulu, youtube, and video sites from playing which is good.

in the early days websites were put up out of the want to have your own little piece of "real estate" on the internet. a place to call your own a "home page" to build and do whatever. The content was there cause you wanted to do it and you enjoyed it. It wasn't to make money.

I would definitely love to see web sites culled and stop with spam.

We are inundated with spam as we drive with spam on billboards/walls/etc
spam in our postal mail (btw to piss off spammers just write Return to Sender on the spam and place it back out and the spammer has to pay return postage)
spam on television a 20 minute show stretched to 1 hour due to spam

all this spam generation has caused me to cut cable and turn to piracy 100% for television, torrent with RSS downloader auto downloads my favorite shows and I can pop on my Western Digital TV Live Plus box and stream them in 1080p to my television over the network.

I run adblocking and use a blocklist on my router which blocks all outgoing/incoming connections to the major ad networks like doubleclick/google, then i have noscript/adblock in my browser as well, little redundant but the router makes sure no pc's or my mobile device sees any ads as well.

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[Anonymous Coward]

I've noticed this too. If a person claims they deserve to make a profit from their work that people are enjoying, then they are fucked. On the other hand, if a person says they are poor and need the money, then people are willing to help them out. Louis CK made a statement about piracy of his work that didn't appeal to what was right (he said he didn't know what to make of piracy in that regard), instead he mentioned that his work wasn't the product of a large company, instead it was all done out of pocket and he needed to make some money back to break even in order to keep making more of that kind of stuff.

Begging and pleading and claiming need seem to be the way to go these days. Just don't talk about what is right or the value of the product.

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[droptone]

This sort of issue is why I am upset that Paypal has turned out to be a problematic company. The main problem I see for getting people to pay, who would want to pay, is that payment causes a hassle. Have a seemless micropayment option would facilitate people paying without the need to enter your financial information into yet another random site and perhaps also create an account. That extra effort just isn't worth it for many users and for me as well.

I've often wondered whether the micropayment option would provide sufficient revenue to online magazines as well. Rather than going with a paywall where you generally prepay for content, have an easy payment option. Every day I read articles that I'd gladly pay $0.10 or $0.50 for without pause. Asking me to prepay for content even for a provider that I like, e.g. foreignaffairs? Only a rare few sites will get that out of me.

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[devent]

You offer it for free. I take it for free. What is unethical about that?
Did I ask you to write the shareware? No you did it at your own account.
I did not ask for it, but you call me immoral or unethical if I take it for free (keep in mind that you gave it to me for free)?

I think you are the immoral here. Just because you done something it don't mean that you deserve money,

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[devent]

They do want it. Because he is telling it was quite a success.
But he offered the Shareware for free and people took it for free. And now he is telling that everybody is immoral because they took the free offer and don't give him money.

It's like my wine and cookies example. Go to a party and bring wine and cookies and call the people immoral because they take it for free and don't give him money.

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[devent]

They do want it. Because he is telling it was quite a success.
But he offered the Shareware for free and people took it for free. And now he is telling that everybody is immoral because they took the free offer and don't give him money.

It's like my wine and cookies example. Go to a party and bring wine and cookies and call the people immoral because they take it for free and don't give him money.

Reply to the wrong thread sorry.

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[Fnord666]

Some time ago I wrote a shareware program that does something no other software does. 100,000 people downloaded it. It got top ratings everywhere. About 60 people emailed me saying how much they like the software. Exactly ONE person paid the $5 "donation" for it. Web sites are like that - people will visit daily, they'll talk about how awesome the site is, but no way they'll fork over $1. They just don't.

None of which mean that even one of those 100,000 people continued to use it for more than a few days. I can download a program, give it top ratings, good reviews and even email you directly to commend your work and be sincere about it, but that doesn't imply that I'm going to continue to use it. Just because I take a car for a test drive, marvel at the features, praise the handling and give a "thumbs up" for fuel economy doesn't mean I'm going to buy it.

You should consider the possibility that rather than not paying for your software because they don't have to, users just aren't finding any long term value in it.

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

I agree 100% with your post, and I run a very similar setup.

What pisses me off about people saying "we can't provide you with this free contents if you don't let us profit from ads" is the following: You are connecting to the internet using a router that most likely runs GNU/Linux, using a browser that is most likely open source to browse the web, then hosting your content on LAMP servers, probably using some Free CMS. All of that was developed for FREE by the community. So, we could write an entire OS plus everything you need to host content on the web cheaper than ever, but you want us to pay through the nose for your poorly worded articles and your dick jokes? Is that where you draw the line for what should be free? Truth is, the internet grew as big as it is right now thanks for Free Software. If people still had to pay thousands of dollars for proprietary operating systems, webservers, mailservers, etc. The Internet would be 10% of what it is right now in size, and it would belong only to major corporations. There would be no slashdot, no wikipedia, and certainly no destructoid or whatever the whinny bitch from the article is called.

We had Free content before. We will continue to produce Free content. You want to profit from your site? Great, make something worthwhile and put it behind a paywall, those interested will pay.

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[0111 1110]

If it is shareware then it wasn't a free offer. Perhaps you are thinking of freeware. Shareware is commercial software and in fact most of it has time limits or other limitations. If you crack the software and do not pay the author you are going against the gentleman's agreement that he intended to make with you. Go ahead and do it, but don't rationalize it based on the fact that he offered it for free. He didn't. He just offered you the chance to try it for free for a limited time.

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[0111 1110]

This is an excellent point. If there were a fast, streamlined way to pay something like 10 cents to view an article (or the remainder of an article after a teaser to see what you are buying) I would probably pay it if I thought the article was worth it. But if paying that 10 cents is cumbersome then I would have to really, really want to view it. Enough even that I might be willing to pay a dollar to view it.

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[Lanterns]

So you're saying we should base the entire Internet on the Wikipedia model? We should let all those nice, generous people support out of their wallets all of the sites they get for free today? Keep dreaming.

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[multimediavt]

You really shouldn't be surprised about that. "Why should I pay if I can have it for free?" is the thinking of the day, and legality, ethics, and morals don't even enter into the thinking. If morals and ethics do enter into the thinking, it is immoral and/or unethical to want to make money off your work.

Did you just contradict yourself? I ask because you seem to be blaming the "Why should I pay if I can have it for free?" behavior on the lack of morals and ethics, then say that it is immoral and unethical to expect money for work (product) or services rendered. Now I would argue with a great deal of recorded history on my side that charging (even in barter if not in currency) has been at the heart of trade since trade existed. Ye ole adage of "I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine." What I am driving at here is, are you advocating licentious behavior or just plain theft?

In the case of web advertisements vs pay wall let me just ask if you had a choice of ads and anonymity or pay wall and personal info exposed which would you choose? I am also guessing you are either living in some agrarian technopolis where everything is free and clean, or you're stealing everything you have (food, rent, etc.), or you've no concept of reality whatsoever. Money has to come from somewhere to pay for hosting, bandwidth, business and tax software, phone lines, business cards, not to mention the production of any content. None of that is free and those costs must be passed on to the consumer somehow to at least break even and stay alive as a business.

Personally, I don't mind ads. I do mind when website owners allow for annoying ads (see definition from other posts to the OP by others). Simple text or still graphic ads are not a problem. Most of us old folks are familiar with those from print and know how to deal with them. But, I don't think that getting paid for work is bad. I do think that putting walls and exorbitant fees on content is bad, but I don't think it should be free (as in air) either.

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[flimflammer]

spam on television a 20 minute show stretched to 1 hour due to spam

Where do you live that 20 minutes of entertainment garners 40 minutes of advertisements?

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[Tom]

Your mistake was making it available for free, asking for donations and not offering anything in exchange.

I have two different experiences with voluntary payments, both very positive.

One, I've been running an online game for 12 years now where you can donate and in return you get an in-game title and an additional character slot. Nothing that provides in-game benefits and it's mostly for vanity. But it is something. As you can check yourself because I am transparent with it all, players are donating a few hundred Euros every month and have been for years.

Two, I sold a toolkit / extension for the Unity 3D engine on a "pick your own price" model, where you could buy the same product for anywhere between $10 and $50. Only half the buyers choose the cheapest option. Again, I was honest and open about the why and how, including that the package is absolutely identical at all price levels, and that I choose that model because I understand that $50 is too much for a small hobby developer playing around for his own fun. I ended with "this tool will save you many hours of work, you decide what your hour is worth".

People are willing to spend money. But they also want to get a value in return and they want to feel engaged. Allowing people a free download and then asking for a donation does neither. It gives them the value for nothing and doesn't make them participate in the process.

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[Darinbob]

I made $20 off of some software that I gave away for free, while never any asking for donations, without any greedy shareware readme files. I almost turned the guy down but he looked so excited to meet me...

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[coolmadsi]

Some time ago I wrote a shareware program that does something no other software does. 100,000 people downloaded it. It got top ratings everywhere. About 60 people emailed me saying how much they like the software. Exactly ONE person paid the $5 "donation" for it. Web sites are like that - people will visit daily, they'll talk about how awesome the site is, but no way they'll fork over $1. They just don't.

I remember once seeing some software that worked fine for a set trial period (a couple of weeks probably), and then added a message saying "Trial period over. You may buy a license to continue using the software as is. If you don't, the software will still function as normal, but everything will be in Comic Sans"

I don't know how many people got a license just to get rid of Comic Sans, however.

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[Reziac]

Out of the 2 million or so Slashdot users, yeah, most don't pay. But a significant portion of the *regular* posters do, as the asterisk behind the username indicates.

I do (and have for over a decade), because my $5 subscription lasts about three years at my rate of usage, which seems reasonable to me. (I use primitive browser settings and don't see ads regardless, so that wasn't really a consideration.) I probably would not pay more than that, tho.

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[devent]

Yes shareware is normally for a limited time. But if I use it at that limited time and not pay you anything, it is still unethical?

As you can clearly read I did not write anything about cracking of the shareware. Also the original poster did not say anything about limited time or limited functionality of his shareware. So I don't know where you get your argument from.

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[sheetsda]

Bulk mail does not get returned to the sender. The post office will just throw it away.

I would argue this is helpful nonetheless as it increases the post office's costs related to bulk mail. I may adopt this practice myself. Here's an amusing thought: I pay for my trash service, a government agency is delivering some trash - can I write some portion of my trash service off my taxes? I understand typically you need to determine what proportion of the service is used for the purpose being written off. In the case of trash would that per unit of mass, per unit of volume, per discarded article?

Slight related, if only we had a similar solution to all the "free newspapers", advertisement fliers and other litter that gets tossed onto my driveway or hung on my mailbox once a week. I fail to see why *I* should be forced to deliver *their* garbage to my trashcan every week. After several attempts I was finally able to get one local free newspaper to stop delivering... mostly. No such luck with the advertisements.

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[blahplusplus]

Does autodesk 3dstudio or photoshop use the wikipedia model? Do videogames? No and they still sell.

Re:Because you don't pay, you just complain

[sysrammer]

None of that is free and those costs must be passed on to the consumer somehow to at least break even and stay alive as a business.

True, and actually, I believe that "break even" puts it in the category of a non-profit org. I once commented on the price of some replacement bolts at a small mfg company that I worked at. The prez of the company replied that he has to make a profit on everything, else he'll go out of business.

Why people block ads

[stasike]

I block ads because some sites are *so* horribly infested with annoying, blinking, screaming, memory-hogging, loud crap that there is no choice but to install something.
I am willing to whitelist a site that asks nicely AND takes care that the advertisments do not make their site un-viewable. No popups, no animated crap that makes reading text impossible, no flash that bogs down entire computer, no loud sound, no articles divided to 20 parts so they can cram 20 times more ads down our collective throats, no double-underlined words that display a caption add when I move mouse over them. It can be done. Have a look at google site.

Please understand: the vast majority of users out there are too lazy and ignorant to mess with switching on the add blocking. They are even willing to use browsers horribly infested with unbelievable amount of crap. In order to make such user to go and ask someone knowledgeable to install an adblock for them they had to be extremely annoyed.

So, if you want to blame somebody, blame stupid webmasters and super-greedy advertisers that created sites that drove us to block ads.

Re:Why people block ads

[erroneus]

They also block them because ad sites are notorious for getting hacked and hosting malware for drive-by infections.

How often do you visit Slashdot? Have you paid?

[raymorris]

Apparently you find slashdot valuable, you're here. Have you paid for a slashdot subscription? I'm on Slashdot daily. I haven't and won't pay, so they'll have to use ads to pay for this post.

Re:How often do you visit Slashdot? Have you paid?

[martin-boundary]

Apparently, you have a slight difficulty with the concepts "some" and "all". Clearly, "some" slashdot readers are willing to pay, and a critical mass of these allows the site to continue existing. It is not necessary that "all" readers be willing to pay.

Moreover, as you no doubt are aware, paying readers get certain perks. I did not suggest this last bit in the case of the site mentioned in TFA, as it didn't seem like a generic solution. Slashdot's main attraction are the comments contributed by readers in the forum, so having perks for some users makes sense. If the main attraction is some journalist's articles, that doesn't apply. Although come to think of it, they could offer perks like being able to have private conversations with the journalists, or get access to their unpublished drafts or whatever. Doubtful, however.

Re:How often do you visit Slashdot? Have you paid?

[raymorris]

Clearly, "some" slashdot readers are willing to pay, and a critical mass of these allows the site to continue existing. It is not necessary that "all" readers be willing to pay.

No more than 1 in 100,000 users are paid. Do you really think one user is going to pay the costs to serve 100,000 freeloaders? Obviously not, hence ads.

Re:How often do you visit Slashdot? Have you paid?

[martin-boundary]

No more than 1 in 100,000 users are paid. Do you really think one user is going to pay the costs to serve 100,000 freeloaders? Obviously not, hence ads.

You're not thinking right. The number of users, freeloaders or otherwise, is irrelevant. What matters are the actual operating costs, which include paying the editors, and paying for the hardware and the bandwidth used. That's pretty much it. Anything else Slashdot might pay for is inessential to its continued existence.

So, compute what it would cost to pay the editors each month, compute the cost of the hardware over several years of use (converting to monthly), and compute the cost of the network access (again converting to monthly from the full contract terms). That's what Slashdot costs per month or thereabouts. If those costs can be covered, it can survive.

I quit my local paper

[EzInKy]

Mostly because their website, which I would use far and above their pulp delivery edition, has a dozen or so foreign sites that need to be blocked and on of top of that they require a friggin' facebook login to comment on a story. My $15/month probably doesn't mean much to them but from what I hear they are seriously hurting for money. Maybe someday they will stumble across a business model that is both agreeable to them and their readership.

Oh, and as far a that 30 day free trial BS "pop up", my offer expired over a year ago yet I can still access articles.

Re:I quit my local paper

[drinkypoo]

Mostly because their website, which I would use far and above their pulp delivery edition, has a dozen or so foreign sites that need to be blocked and on of top of that they require a friggin' facebook login to comment on a story.

We call this incompetence. If you tell them that they are incompetent, of course, they will only think you are an idiot. Vintage*******supply (think canned ham) sends you out to some known spammers for sales surveys. When I emailed them and told them that if they wanted me to fill out their survey they should develop some competence they became quite irate and let me know they had only three employees! Well, it only takes one employee who knows what they're doing to develop a website that doesn't suck, and if you use a decent CMS you get surveys for free. They have three employees and apparently none of them are more clever than they have to be to put stuff in boxes and send it out to customers, certainly none of them are competent web developers.

Your local paper is the same. They have no competent technical employees and they elected to attempt to go digital without hiring one. Comedy ensues.

Re:I quit my local paper

[Common Joe]

I quit my local paper because they had crap articles. Articles with blatantly wrong information, contradicting information within the same paper on the same day, and ads that looked like news articles.

I have yet to see any (what I would consider) unbiased news from a regularly reliable source. I'd pay for that.

Re:I quit my local paper

[EzInKy]

The BBC seems to be the best for me, but that is from an American perspective.

Re:I quit my local paper

[Common Joe]

I'm an American whose married to a German. The BBC is still fairly biased, but IMHO it is a fair bit better than most (all?) of their American counterparts.

ads annoying or valuable to your readers?

[dltaylor]

1: ads are a VERY common way to get Windows infections; can you GUARANTEE that none of your ads will EVER infect a reader/casual visitor? It would require hosting the ads on YOUR site and vetting every single one of them. If you don't do that, please go out of business.

2: many/most/nearly all ads are annoying, even if not destructive; constant "I went to a site and the damn commercials nearly fried my speakers", "that flashing crap caused a petite mal event", ... mean, again, that I'd rather you disappeared.

3: tracking cookies; why would anyone with an IQ higher than a houseplant's want that done to them?

4: offer me a box on the screen with something, presumably of interest since I'm at your site, then allow me to "click to play" if it's video/animation, "click for link", and, you know what, I may (have in fact) followed them. /. allows me to kill ads, but I haven't bothered on my tablet. I have found items of interest here.

Re:ads annoying or valuable to your readers?

[thejynxed]

This is one of the reasons I still use Chrome, even though some people question the use thereof (I have no issues with Google providing me targeted advertising, as they do it in text-link only form for the services of theirs that I use). Click-to-Play is the new IWin button. I was able to ditch Flashblock finally (thus saving up tons of resources). Click-to-Play works on more than just Flash as well, it works for all media content types that use browser plugins (Flash, Shockwave, Quicktime, etc).

I coupled this with turning off Location services, etc in the browser settings, and presto.

Is it ad-blocking to not install Flash Player?

[tepples]

Simply don't provide content to people who use ad-blockers.

Then you'll end up blocking users who have enough disposable income to buy an iOS or Android device because lack of support for SWF has the effect of blocking SWF ads.

Despite adblocking, ads get through.

[Anonymous Coward]

I also use Adblock+ and visit gaming sites. Believe me, I get plenty of ads. The videos of gaming events that I download (this being the primary reason I'm on those sites - I'm a sucker for competitive Starcraft 2) are full of advertising. I tolerate it because the advertised companies are genuine sponsors and make the tournaments happen. Destructoid really doesn't. They are parasitic on the interest that has been generated in games. I'm not saying that's bad, but suggesting that the internet doesn't need them. Gaming will be just as good without them, and their role will be filled by people who do their job for love and not money. Or, it won't be done at all, but, so what?

Think of the Children - I mean, Gaming Websites

[Kilo Kilo]

Destructoid needs to put their business model in perspective. They're in an industry that isn't a necessity; it requires people spend their disposable income. If your business plan involves doing things your customers don't like (meaning, things other than charging them) don't be surprised when your customers try and avoid those things, or just leave altogether. Crying about people not suffering through your ads doesn't help anything. Chances are if these people are blocking your ads, they're not going to click on them anyway.

Advertising is an odd, middleman-style business that seems to somehow justify its own existence. Yes, I understand the need to spread the word about your product, but effective advertising is extremely rare. Instead of "relevant ads" we are bombarded with useless and vague ads about things. If I see a commercial for people dancing around at a party, this doesn't make me want to buy a hamburger.

And it's becoming more and more ingrained in society as acceptable. I know this really doesn't apply to TFA, but if I see ads in more places, shouldn't I be paying less for the services?

Host the Ads yourself!

[erroneus]

The online ad model is stupid. These ad companies want to host ttheir own ads so they can count each hit. This is how they hope to maximize their income. The problem is, it's working against them and they are STILL doing it. They need to go back to the broadcast and print model where the "sponsor" trusts the publisher to present the ads faithfully. Once the ads are moved from sites like "doubleclick" to the originating site, the ads become more difficult to block.

But I would prefer they sef-destruct due to their own greed and lack of trust.

Ad service reputation ranking and blocking

[jbeaupre]

Right now we associate annoying ads with the site we see them on. Our only options are to put up with them or block them for a site. There's no fine grained feedback.

A better system would be to have a reputation system. A Slashdot style reputation system of rating ads and ad sources combined with filtering based on preferences would let users both control why types of ads they will put up with and give feedback to advertisers as to which characteristics are going to get them blocked from a lot of eyeballs.

Re:Effective for now, but short sighted...

[jafiwam]

Advertisers will eventually pay less or stop paying entirely when nobody inevitably buys their products. If they pay an agency, then the agency will reduce the payout or block the site entirely in favor of the higher performing sites. Nobody seems to consider that branding alone on the internet is not where the money comes from. Rich leads that end up buying products or signing up for content is normally the desired outcome of the advertiser. Take that away from them and they stop paying. Lose lose.

I don't think the cause and effect there is valid.

Like a lot of spam, the crime is occurring where the seller of spam services misleads the buyer about what they are getting ("lots of traffic!*" *nevermind that it's not traffic you want") the ad agencies and Google and others are convincing businesses of smaller and smaller means "you can get rich using the internet"

So there's always some other sucker to feed money into the ad-display industry that thinks something good will happen if they pay.

The ones whining, are the sites that get rich on the ad-display scam residuals coming through.

I have found, that if a small site takes the time to run ads for products they hand pick (and are also therefore hard to block because they run from the same URL) that the product is often worth looking at... after all, the site owner and I both thought the subject was interesting, now we have some other interesting thing in common.

I aggressively use all types of ad-blockers, and just today started a quest for a way to block all the external probes Facebook has placed everywhere. I am not going to stop, ever.

Find a new business model or die. That's all there is to it. My time, bandwidth and clicks are not some resource for some self-entitled internet communist to demand to fund his second pool at his summer house. The sites I have seen that are complaining about ad blockers are all run by guys who got rich by their ads.

Fark, for example both added tons more ads, sold out to the point that the rules were drastically changed to appease advertisers, and the guy that runs it has enough cash to go running all over to "meet up" with fans and quit his main job a while back. Now the site whines about end users using an ad blocker. Guess what, a fewer ads, less pandering to uptight nancies and more people would be ignoring the ads (and thus, letting them display).

I might sign up, and turn off ad blockers if I got some of the revenue in return. But not if it's "because I can give you content". Sorry, someone else will do it just as well.

I wouldn't block ads were they not annoying.

[John Hasler]

Here's the thing, though. As I would never buy any of the products advertised on any of the sites I read unblocking the ads would still not help in the long run.

Fortunately, most people have more money than brains and buy lots of silly crap. Thanks.

Users are beginning to think

[ninjacheeseburger]

I started using ad blocker when ads became very annoying, distracting and in some cases NSFW. I've found that good sites now that have ads relevant to what they show and have begun to turn ad blocker off for those sites. I still have no script turned on which usually stops the ads from moving etc.

I think Destructoid should inform users of the problem. Ask to be white listed by users or offer an add free subscription version of the site.

Answering the question -

[userw014]

What happens when 50% of Users block advertisements?

Why, you have now have two kinds of users. The smart ones who block, and the dumb ones who don't.

The smart ones probably have more money to spend - but it'll be harder to extract money from them.

The dumb ones will have less money to spend - if for no other reason than they've spent it already on dumb ideas. But it'll be easier to get money out of them.

Pick your mark.

I happily block ads, and will continue to do so...

[intnsred]

There are several reasons I block ads: I don't want to be tracked. And I don't want to be conned, gamed, decieved and/or lied to (and for most ads, this is their goal). But most of all, to me it goes back to a fundamental concept of computing: This is my computer, I'm paying for the network link, and I get to choose what enters my computer and how I use/display that data/info.

Sadly, advertising permeates our society and is forced down people's throats everywhere. Back in college when they had ideals, Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google said, "We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers." They were right. The same concept applies to other advertising.

Does this mean that Destructoid or other sites might disappear because people like me don't want advertising? Yup, it might. But that's not my problem -- it's an "adapt or die" mindset. If they choose a less deceptive way of funding themselves -- straight subscription, crowd sourcing, whatever -- I'll decide whether their value is worth me paying what they ask.

Then I'll decide whether to allow their text, data, pics and videos, etc., into my computer, and I then I'll decide how I want to use/display that content.

There's an old saying in business: The customer is always right. If the customer doesn't like your advertising or business model, the business has a problem, not the customer.

Because of reasons

[p0p0]

In the past month, many if my regular sites have been flagged by Google for malware and when resolved it was all down to malicious software being served by their ad provider.

For the first time in years I visited Youtube on a freshly installed system without any addons installed, and it blew my mind how many ads there were. The main page had about 3 ads including a huge video ad in the middle. This was on a netbook and so the time it took for the ad to load was not appreciated. I loaded a music video and there was a video ad, a popup on the video, and that annoying frame around official music videos that show the next crappy pop star (in this case it was Nicki Minaj, and that was really unappreciated).

Some sites that I do visit ask me to turn it off and they so far have only served me very simple image ads or text ads which I don't really mind. It's when an ad starts playing animation and/or audio that I block them and sometimes just block the site itself completely.

You don't need to be intrusive to sell your product. It just annoys the end user. I don't remember a single flashy ads name, so that obviously does not work (in my case).

Amazon Merchant

[gravis777]

Stop using ads and start doing stuff like being an Amazon merchant. Link your reviews and stuff to your Amazon merchant account - when a user clicks through to buy something, they get revenue. There are several Blu-Ray review sites that do just that. Stop bombarding us with flash ads and stuff - give us your story, and a link to where we can buy the game. Happy users, and a solution to your issues.

Here is some links to sites that do just this:

http://www.highdefdigest.com/ (notice the ads are off to the side of the page, its not distracting, and relates to the site)

http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/7388/santa_martians.html (provides Amazon link to buy the product. Side bar has some ads relating to the site)

http://www.blu-ray.com/ (Links at the top of the page take you to their articles, with a link in their article to buy the product on Amazon)

http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Life-of-Pi-3D-Blu-ray/60865/#Review (example of an article, with links to the Amazon store)

Both of these sites are very clean and well designed, do not bombard the users with ads, with the exception of links to buy movies, which is exactly why the users are at the site to begin with. The sites make enough from click-throughs to stay in business (unless movie companies are paying them to write reviews, which is possible). In any case, the sites are able to stay in business, pay operating costs and pay staff, and are able to keep from bombarding users with ads.

It's not that foreign of a concept. If I go to a review site, don't bombard me with a flash ad for Pepsi or some reverse-home-mortgage, or something. Just give me a link to where I can buy the product you are talking about.

Don't use unnecessary Flash or Java

[therealkevinkretz]

It's an ad. A picture and some words and a link. It doesn't need to show me a movie or play me a song. Flash and Java are at or near the top of the list of frequency of vulnerabilities found. Plus, they're often pigs.

Stop that and people won't be annoyed by the ads. Will a single site that addresses those concerns still suffer because of ad-backlash to all the other sites? Probably.

Why spare youtube?

[betterunixthanunix]

I remember a time when videos were being shared on P2P networks. Kill youtube and bring back peer to peer video sharing.

Re:Why spare youtube?

[Pseudonym Authority]

Ahh, the good old days when you could just jump on limewire and get your copy of cute funny kitten makes hilarious prank call illegal underage sex windows 95 cracked manifesto dark incest make money online instant cash iso rom download .mpg.jpg.aids.mp3.exe within minutes. Of course, if you want to be a lame square, you could take the easy way and use torrent, but then you'd better hope there are still seeds three months later!

Re:Flattr

[Elijha]

But that goes on the assumption people are willing to 'tip'. In the US that's a cultural jump that can possibly happen - since I believe you tip on a lot of 'services' usually personally delivered. But in other places it is not so common.

I block abusive ads

[Skapare]

Abusive ads have one or more of the following:

• Use animated GIF to blink
• Use Flash
• Use Java
• Track users
• Load from another domain

These are the ones I block. I suggest advertisers start treating people as people.

Re:I block abusive ads

[Tom]

I'd like to add one more:

They influence the content.

There's now so much content on the Internet that has adapted to the ads instead of the other way around. The most obvious one are articles spread out over many pages for no other reason than increasing the number of page impressions. But there are many other, less obvious ways. Like the layout of sites dictated by "optimal" banner width and skyscraper dimensions. Text flows optimized to make your eyes pass over the ads a maximum number of times. And others.

Re:I block abusive ads

[melikamp]

No. Annoying ads have a single feature, and it has nothing to do with layout. They "inform" how to pay top dollar for an inferior product. That's 99.9% of ads. That is also why spending money on marketing works at all: for a small price, one can mislead consumers into making irrational choices. You want examples of annoyance-free ads?

Wikimedia asking for money on wikipedia.com. A Wikipedia user already found Wikipedia useful, so the ad correctly assumes that many will be glad to contribute.

An ad for legislation aimed to cut medical costs by instituting single-payer healthcare, assuming it's effective. This can be put anywhere, as everyone but a handful of private insurers is benefited by this.

An ad telling smokers to quit smoking, placed on a cigarette pack. You get the idea. An annoyance-free ad is designed to benefit the viewer, and is only shown to people it is likely to benefit.

That site is a joke.

[JakeBurn]

My Ghostery blocked 14 scripts from loading on that site. The sad thing is, with all that blocked, the entire left and right quarter of the screen came up blank. If a site needs that much revenue from ads for mostly re-reporting what other people have already written they do not deserve to be in business in the first place. I can't stand that most of these types of sites have nothing but garbage opinions and things I've read elsewhere AND think they have a right to gather my information for free, even if its just my IP. If it was for their own metrics, fine but not to 14 entities that I never clicked on or agreed to share with. I've never clicked on disable advertising on Slashdot and yet I'm still looking at most of my screen showing content. I don't have Musinex ads screaming out of my speakers. If they want to survive, sites like Destructoid need to figure out how to do it in a way that consumers are willing to put up with.

Force ads

[wisnoskij]

It is not like it is hard to detect adblocking. And display a message, or just block all content.
I really do not know why sites do not do this.

But in reality, just asking nicely for all your customers to turn off their adblockers would hopeful do enough.

Re:Force ads

[jones_supa]

If it really is possible to detect adblocking (I do not know the technical details), it might be a good idea to pop up a thin banner at the top of the page explaining the situation.

"Your web browser has been detected to be blocking advertisements. Please notice that this website is made possible by advertising. We gratefully ask you to allow advertising to support this website."

Re:What they want isn't always what they want

[BasilBrush]

Everyone would have become aware of them because they'd see them on the road. And people that had a good experience of these new horseless carriages would have told their friends. If someone wanted to know about horseless carriages, they'd go over and chat to someone who had one, even if they didn't know them.

The advantages of these methods are that they'd get a much more truthful appraisal of the pros and cons than if they were "informed" by adverts.

Revenue models and user behavior

[zhrike]

There isn't a website that has yet existed that is necessary. That could also apply to every movie and television show that has even been produced, and most books. If your content is valuable, it will generate value. You just have to find out how.

If I visit a site where ads ruin the experience, I'm gone. There is no content that can justify that reality for me, so I act accordingly.

I find advertising to be reprehensible in its mass form. It conveys the very worst of us, and exists upon, and strengthens, a platform of dishonesty. There are exceptions, yes, but that is the general rule IMO.

I block ads in every way that I can - if I find a site with great content that interests me, I pay for it. That's exceedingly rare.

Point being: if you want to exist, find a different revenue model. If your users are blocking ads, that should be communicating something to you - and very strongly at 50%! Change your behavior, don't try to change theirs.

Re:Revenue models and user behavior

[zhrike]

Useful != necessary.

I contribute to wikipedia and archive.org.

Not a smart move

[corvax]

How would the people paying for the ads know that half their users are blocking it? Oh wait they tell the world via a post their website. Gee i wonder if the advertisers are going to want to pay them anymore. Adblockers dont allow the content (ads) to download to your computer why dont we have smarter adblockers that download them to a sandbox and immediately destroy them giving them the impression that we are seeing them? And our browsers should NEVER let websites know we are even running these plugins EVER

Re:Not a smart move

[BasilBrush]

Adblockers dont allow the content (ads) to download to your computer why dont we have smarter adblockers that download them to a sandbox and immediately destroy them giving them the impression that we are seeing them?

Because two of the reasons for ad-blocking are to speed up web-browsing and to reduce data usage.

But some people might be willing to make the compromise you describe.

Re:Not a smart move

[bytesex]

Because they load the pages, but they don't load the ads. You do a simple count-comparison between serverlogs.

If advertisers want their ads to be seen, they need to either run worthwhile content on their servers (so that users are loathe to let their adblockers block it), or inline the ads within the page (which is such an easy solution, I can't believe I'd have to tell them).

My reason? Delays loading pages because of ADs

[wadeal]

Before AdBlock I got so frustrated when visiting some websites because of the ridiculous choice of the devs to force the ads to load before the rest of the page, ads loaded on another server. So I had to sit there for 20 seconds looking at "Waiting for x.net" because the advertisers couldn't pay for proper hosting.

Now when I click on a site it just loads.

This BS prompted me to go out and find something like AdBlock. This was both the site owner and the advertisers fault.

Anyway, who said the internet has to be a "commercial" thing? What, I won't get to see what fucking celebrity is fucking who or have YouTube tell me what to do, any of a million companies track me and everything about me?

What will end up happening is someone/multiple someones will be paid off and a law banning this type of software will be passed. I'd love to think website owners would actually have to innovate and find another way, but there's too much money in this.

Gee, I wonder why.

[David Gerard]

http://i.imgur.com/IZDxmzb.jpg

I appreciate the ads that get in people's faces pay more. Until they're blocked.

Re:Maybe Make less annoying ads?

[Skapare]

Maybe you are using the word "maybe" too much.

Charge.

[thunderclap]

Business people need to accept things: Copyright infringement is here to stay, so deal with through ignoring it.(its advertisement). People hate ads for many reasons, so only use them to grab that initial group and accept that people will block them. Charge for content. You can't do infinite growth. Grow slowly. There is a hard ceiling for everything. Punch through it and you will fail. examples IBM in 90's Microsoft now, Digg, facebook, venezuela etc.

How about this

[Triv]

There's gotta be a table somewhere that shows, more or less, how many ads a person like me potentially would click on a year and fundamentally what that's worth. Figure out what that amount is, combine it with my, say, top 5 or top 10 visited sites, multiply it by 100 (since it's probably pennies), make it easy for me to pay and I'll cut them a check in exchange for an ad-free browsing experience.

I pay for NPR; I would pay for my most visited websites if they made it easy.

Re:What they want isn't always what they want

[EdZ]

How would the benefits of an automobile end up in such a person's research?

Through thorough and independent testing of cars v.s horses. A full-page ad of "BUY OUR CARS BECAUSE THEY'RE GOOD" is a mere unsubstantiated claim.

Tragedy of the Commons

[Kardos]

Internet advertising is an excellent example of tragedy of the commons. Everyone who runs ads has something to gain by making theirs bigger / more obnoxious than the other guys to get more attention and presumably more clicks. The tragedy is that it destroys internet advertising for everyone -- nobody has built an "obnoxious ad blocker" -- so we're all running an "all ads blocker". Advertisers: you've shot yourselves in the feet.

Bill Hicks had it right

[Anonymous Coward]

By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing kill yourself.

No, no, no it’s just a little thought. I’m just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day, they’ll take root – I don’t know. You try, you do what you can. Kill yourself.

Seriously though, if you are, do.

Aaah, no really, there’s no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan’s little helpers. Okay – kill yourself – seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good, seriously. No this is not a joke, you’re going, “there’s going to be a joke coming,” there’s no fucking joke coming. You are Satan’s spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It’s the only way to save your fucking soul, kill yourself.

Planting seeds. I know all the marketing people are going, “he’s doing a joke” there’s no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend – I don’t care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking makinations. Machi Whatever, you know what I mean.

I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too, “Oh, you know what Bill’s doing, he’s going for that anti-marketing dollar. That’s a good market, he’s very smart.”

Oh man, I am not doing that. You fucking evil scumbags!

“Ooh, you know what Bill’s doing now, he’s going for the righteous indignation dollar. That’s a big dollar. A lot of people are feeling that indignation. We’ve done research – huge market. He’s doing a good thing.”

Godammit, I’m not doing that, you scum-bags! Quit putting a godamm dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet!

“Ooh, the anger dollar. Huge. Huge in times of recession. Giant market, Bill’s very bright to do that.”

God, I’m just caught in a fucking web.

“Ooh the trapped dollar, big dollar, huge dollar. Good market – look at our research. We see that many people feel trapped. If we play to that and then separate them into the trapped dollar”

How do you live like that? And I bet you sleep like fucking babies at night, don’t you?

“What didya do today honey?”

“Oh, we made ah, we made ah arsenic a childhood food now, goodnight.” [snores] “Yeah we just said you know is your baby really too loud? You know?” [snores] “Yeah, you know the mums will love it.” [snores]

Sleep like fucking children, don’t ya, this is your world isn’t it?

Advertisers don't get it, it seems

[Opportunist]

Ads get more and more obnoxious as time goes on. I guess the train of thought is that people don't click ads because they didn't see them, so they have to be more intrusive to get seen and then people will click.

Bzzzzt. Sorry, wrong, but thanks for playing (I'd even thank you more if you stopped playing).

The reason is a very different one: You're hawking a product nobody wants. The way I see it, to get me to click on an ad, getting me to notice it is only the first step out of many. There are so many others, and the most important two are simply that

- I have to have some use for your product
- I have to want to do business with you

Now, please tell me why I should even consider doing business with you if you yell in my face. Would you? Be honest. If I came up to you and jumped up and down in front of you while you're trying to have a conversation with your friend or read something that interests you, would you even listen to me when I yelled into your ear and generally be as obnoxious as I can be? Most likely you'll grab me and throw me into the next garbage bin you find. And that's, essentially, what the people using ad blocking on your ads do: They toss your ads into the garbage. Without even looking at them. They may even be for a product they'd be at the very least mildly interested in, but presented in THAT manner? I wouldn't do business with you if you were the last person on earth offering this product.

The only thing I'd ever want from you is to be left alone.

For the longest time I had no ad blocker running. What I did instead was to automatically close every pop up that started to load, without even looking what it was about. It was a popup, it was obnoxious, I didn't even WANT to know what it was about.

Lately, YouTube started to insert ad clips before giving me the clip I want to see. What does this accomplish? The same. You sit there with your mouse hovering over "wait 5 seconds to skip ad", and as soon as "skip ad" is offered, you click. I've probably seen the first 5 seconds of a few ads by now, and I even have no idea what those ads were for. Who thought it would be a bright idea to do that? There's this user who wants to see a clip. And he wants to see it NOW because, well, when he types his search string into YouTube and hits go, he wants to see it. No matter how interesting your ad could be, this is NOT the time this user will watch it. He wants to see his clip. Unless, maybe, he has the attention span of a gold fish and gets easily distracted by shiny things, but then, chances are that he will have forgotten about your ad by the time his clip finishes, so what's the point?

Ask the users... sponsorship worked for us.

[NGRhodes]

I co-started and co-ran a niche forum for approx 5 years that quickly got popular and needed dedicated hosting. It is/was a community site, we presented funding options to the users (as we did any major change), to start with donations worked, but we started getting a high proportion of non registered users after exposure in a couple of national magazines. What we found was paid sponorship worked. Sponsors offered discounts, had permant/rotation (depending on how much paid) placement on places on the site. Were allow to post sales/discounts/group buys deals and be part of the community, posting advice, competition prizes, free stickers etc. Was such a sucess that one sponsor paid for a whole years hosting up front. But the main thing was these were businesses that came reccomended by the users of the site or we thought would offer value to the users of our site and that is IMHO the weak point of generic 3rd party advertisers, they really are third party, relevance can suffer and they seldom can provide back to the community. We worked hard with sponsors to develop relationships with the community and themselves and it was quite clear that it in our niche it was mutually benificial. But the clear thing is as we setup the discount deals, allowing sponsors to post, at every step we ran these ideas past the community, sometimes a one month trial to get feedback, but one thing that over five years never changed and that was a strong dislike for using a 3rd party ad service.

Re:Ask the users... sponsorship worked for us.

[0111 1110]

I've never clicked on an internet advertisement in my life and probably wouldn't for many of the same reasons that I wouldn't respond to spam in my email, but I have occasionally clicked through to a sponsors website. If a business is willing to support a website that I like then when I need to buy something related to the site's content I am happy to consider them first and let them know that I found them through that web site. That is a civilized way to do things. Of course that only works for specialized web sites.

I block ads until a site proves itself useful

[ctid]

For the sites that I read a lot, I don't block ads. However, I have to be convinced that the site is useful before I'll switch off my adblocker. Destructoid seems to be slashdotted at the moment, so I can't RTFA. I would be interested to see whether it's 50% of regular visitors who are blocking ads, or 50% of all visitors.

What is next

[paiute]

Here is what happens: The advertisers submit ads to the person generating site content, who incorporates the ads into content such that it can't be automatically blocked. Not as dynamic as what the model is now but if sites with sophisticated users who block ads which are inserted on the fly by third parties want to keep up, well, that is the future.

Youtube Ads

[Sibko]

We've been doing renovations on the house here, so I recently moved in with my father for a couple weeks while getting everything done at home. I noticed that suddenly youtube seemed to have an incredible number of ads when I used his computer. I wasn't really sure what had happened, I assumed maybe there was something related to his google account that showed him more ads, or perhaps youtube had suddenly implemented a massive new ad campaign.

Eventually, I realized, my dad's computer didn't have adblock, while mine did. The difference this made was staggering. I'd always assumed Youtube was just really gentle with their advertisements - I'd still get them, but they were quiet and relatively few. Without adblock, jesus, I couldn't believe what the site was like without adblock. It's nearly as bad as cable TV.

The thing is, I happened to be building a new computer at the time and decided to forego the normal adblock install in chrome. That changed after about a week, youtube was a significant part of that decision, but there many many website that would pop-up shit on the screen that would block out all the other content and darken everything except the ad, or there'd be annoying little mini-videos strewn about the page, or they'd blare some noise loudly and randomly.

Seriously, I don't mind ads. They pay for the content I enjoy, but this is too much.

Re:Youtube Ads

[Trogre]

I'm curious - does AdBlock also block the very worst kind of ad - the unskippable video ads that appear in the actual YouTube video stream?

Very likely they'll fold

[Kimomaru]

Video game web sites basically do two things; 1) they spend money to generate their own content, and 2) they scan other sites for news and then post it themselved. I have to chuckle whenever I go through Flipboard and see the same article posted 40 times by every outlet. A video game review site's key diferentiator, for example, used to be video game reviews (written and/or in video) and now you can find these kinds of reviews on Youtube where they tend to be better written and produced (and you're likely to find a critic who is more inline with your tastes so that the review scores actually have meaning.) And anyhow, for better or worse, Metacritic is the go-to source now for gaming reviews (and I understand the arguments against, I'm just saying.)

The ad space model is easy to do, everyone does it, and so the business model can't support all of these sites anymore. And, frankly, it's just as well. Most of these sites really aren't providing anything special - mostly they're composed of "articles" posted by "journalists" and then have links pointed to forums to help build a community. Anybody can do that and so everyone does.

The real winners, by a country mile, are the webmasters and DBAs who cut their teeth supporting these sites since now they have a marketable skillset on a production web site and can parley that experience to other roles in the field.

A lot of them

[kilodelta]

Overdo the ads. I look at video sites like Hulu - a block of 140 seconds worth of the same ads repeated over and over again? That's a blocking just waiting to happen.

One 30 second bloc of ads is fine. But when you start slamming 4 to 6 ads at a time and every 7 to 10 minutes of a show, fuck you and your advertisers with a rusty spike, you're getting blocked.

Re:A lot of them

[Common Joe]

I watched a couple of episodes with the same friggin ad being spewed over and over again. I couldn't take it. I stopped watching tv on the Internet and that was a couple of years ago.

Re:A lot of them

[kilodelta]

Well in my case I scrubbed a couple netstat dumps before and during commercials and found the ad servers and blocked the fuckers. In fact on hulu every now and then they use an ad server I have blocked. Just gotta get off my lazy ass and do the before/after netstats and do a diff on them to see what bubbles to the top.

I don't mind ads

[PPH]

I do mind advertisers tracking me across multiple sites. Find a way to fix that problem and I'll put up with ad banners. In fact, if some though has gone into their placement, I might be interested in related products.

The main reason I block ads.

[atomicxblue]

I have ad fatigue, plain and simple. Some marketing genius decided we must be advertised to from the moment we wake up, until we go to bed.

There's an easy solution!

[FauxReal]

Just beam the ads directly into our dreams to subsidize ad-free websites!

Fuck them all. I had great content

[ralphaostrander]

Before even one ad company existed and thing will work long after they are gone. I block everything all the time. And will never stop until they are all gone once again.

I used to block ads..

[Anonymous Coward]

.. but then I took an arrow to the knee.

HEYOOO!

Ma-lware also comes through ads

[techvet]

Tell them that many people have been infected by ads that were serving up mal-ware. *That* is one huge reason to block ads. (Never mind some of the questionable tastes of the ads.)

host your own ads.

[HybridST]

Host your own non-flash ads from the same domain and I'll see them fine. Very few do this though so I rarely see webvertisements.

Also /. seems to like adding "(?)" at the end of my subject lines in preview. Weird.

Obvious solution

[wonkey_monkey]

Get a link to your blog posted on Slashdot, doubling your visitors and restoring the number of ad-viewing visitors to what it was before.

Nobody wants ads in the way while they're trying to read something

You can safely shorten that by 9 words.

Re:Obvious solution

[faedle]

I disagree, personally. I actually don't mind relevant, unobtrusive advertising. I also don't mind when it's creative and interesting. The problem is so much of the ads out there (not just online, but in society at large) is neither relevant nor unobtrusive.

Google does have the right approach: targeted ads that are relevant and simple.

It their own fault

[bobjr94]

Not any one site in particular but ads overall got way to obnoxious in the mid 2000's. Pop up videos that autoplay for new movies and cars, flash ads on everyweb site that blast out "congratulations you won a new.....click here to claim your prize" For whatever reason my boss still uses IE, he gets tons of viruses on his computers, many from legitimate sites (MSN once) probably though ads that they have no control over.

I use an adblocker..

[faedle]

.. but I whitelist certain ad servers.

I have three simple rules.
1. Ads should never have audio, popouts, popunders, or Flash/Javascript/Java content.
2. Ads should never exceed the download size of the page
3. Ad systems should respect my privacy and be responsive to complaints and concerns.

If your ad site adheres to these three rules, I see no reason to block it. Oddly enough, only Google's, Reddit's and Fark's ad servers are on the whitelist. Everybody else can go rot in hell.

They tightened their grip too much

[russotto]

and now all their star systems have slipped through their fingers. Seriously, if you go to the site first of all it hangs for a long time. This does not appear to be due to loading ads but I bet a lot of users think it is. Then you get an interstitial ad. Once you're past the interstitial, you get a huge animated banner at the top and depending on the page, possibly also animated ads to the right. If you were trying to push users to adblockers, this is how you would design a site.

Google adds works fine

[rsilvergun]

I've used it for my site glimmersoft.com for months and not had a single complaint. It pays for my bandwidth bill. You're right though. The guy that runs somethingpositive nd the angry Nintendo Nerd just got popped. It's best to stay off the smaller ad networks if that's how you fund your site. Yeah, they pay better, but they can't keep up with securing the ads.

As for the ads themselves, I'd say keep 'em out of your content proper. Banner ads are one thing but lately CNN has been putting them in the content as plain links, and it's distracting. I didn't mind when they were clearly delimited by a box, but I keep seeing these ones where they're in the middle of the paragraph. I can't tune those out, I've got to stop reading the article and realize it's an add.

Online ads seem to work best for brand recognition anyway. It's hard to get somebody to buy something specific, but if you're just trying to remind them that McDonald's and Coke exist (important with so many cable TV cord cutters) it's the way to go.

Trojans, Phishing, etc....

[David_Hart]

I was fine with displaying ads for web sites until most web sites signed up for the various online 3rd party advertisement networks. The problem with these is that you never know which Ad site has been hacked, which ad site has been submitted by phishing groups, etc.

I don't deliberately block all Ads. My solution is to run "no script" for firefox. If you have ads being served locally, then I'll see them. If you have ads being displayed by a third party javascript then you're out of luck. Granted, this isn't perfect because even local sites can be hacked. But most of the sites I visit are reputable and would quickly (hopefully) fix their sites.

Couple big guys got hit

[rsilvergun]

Somethingpositive.net and Angry Nintendo Nerd both. They had ads serving up Malware. It happens on the smaller ad networks, but the smaller guys pay better than google and Amazon. If you're trying to make a living you're kinda stuck.

Scripting and Flash is your problem.

[Nexion]

Your analytic javascript and horrid flash is the problem. I don't run advertisement blocking software. I run NoScript, and the way you try to advertise to me is why you fail. Why not put an image up in that 200x80 that is linked to whatever site will make the desired product pitch and make sure that site doesn't require flash or javascript. Then use javascript to change the image advertisement with your horrid intrusive analytic scripting and/or lame flash. You still get to advertise to me it is just that your advertisement customer can't find some way to use your advertisement delivery channel as a great way to compromise my system's security.

I don't mind tasteful relevant advertisements, and no that does not mean you have to anal probe me and track me everywhere I go. Nor do you need to compile a database on the things I like. Open your eyes, where am I now? Slashdot... hmmm... this one is probably a geek! You can tell what a person is interested in by the content they are viewing during your advertising opportunity. Advertisements that try to block the screen or have some stupid "hit the monkey with a hammer to win the prize" bullshit are why you have this problem now. Congrats, you pissed off the user so much with your marketing department stupidity that you gave incentive for users to find a solution to rid them of it.

Now adapt, evolve and try not to be a dick this time, ok?

Only Half?

[sudon't]

It always amazes me whenever I find out someone's not using ad-blocking. But, unlike most people I know, I won't watch TV because of ads, and I certainly won't pay for cable for the same reason. Does anyone remember when the deal with cable was: you have to pay for it, but there were no ads? Once they got their foot in the door, well, you see what became of it. I've just never been able to tolerate advertising the way others seem to.

As far as I'm concerned, the commercialization of the web was the worst thing to happen to it. These people who view the internet as a money-making scheme, if their sites disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn't miss them. Perhaps if everyone used ad-blocking, we could bring that day closer? What we see now is, the same dumbed-down, lowest common denominator type of crap you find on television, cluttering the web, and chewing up bandwidth. And because it's been dumbed-down, law-enforcement and politicians followed the herd right into it, threatening the freedom once taken for granted online.

So, don't pity these people who are having a hard time filling their pockets by monetizing our interests and personal information. Encourage them to find an honest way to make a living by using ad-blocking, anti-tracking, and cookie-managing software. Please.

Suck on it

[cfalcon]

Who gives a shit? We don't have to view their shitty ads. If that makes them collapse or find a new way to charge for content, great. There's not some magical genie in the sky demanding that we view overly obtrustive ads. MY computer does what I want it to do. That doesn't include trying to hawk someone's shitty wares, and it DEFINITELY doesn't include doing so in a disruptive way that abuses the fuck out of java, javascript, and flash to pop up, pop under, full screen, volumejack, and sometimes drop exploit code on my box.

"I'm doing this immoral thing, but unlike the rest of the net where adblock is rare, enough of my users are sophisticated enough to jump through the hoops because we suck Satan's dick so much. What do I do next?"

Get fucked.

Loss?

[O'Nazareth]

As I understand it, ad-blocker users would click like crazy on all the ads if they did not have a blocker.

That means the ads are 100% too intrusive.

[__aaltlg1547]

It's a simple calculation, really.

Meh

[vga_init]

I used to block ads because they slowed down my computer or interrupted what I was doing. For example, if an ad was a popup of some sort, or if it had to load a plugin like flash. 10 years ago I had an Athlon XP 3000 with 256mb of RAM, and with my internet connection and computer speed even normal ads slowed down my browsing. The most logical thing to do was block the ads; I never even looked at them anyway, and I certainly had never clicked on an ad.

Fast forward to now, I have an Athlon II 4x, 8gb of RAM, and Google Chrome, and ads just don't seem to make a difference anymore. I don't notice the time it takes for them to load, and they generally don't get in my way. Now just installing an ad blocker would be a hassle. On systems that are a little sluggish I will mainly just use a flash blocker, which I find to be more simple and effective than ad blocking.

I don't believe very strongly in online advertising. It works effectively for some companies, but also there is this prevailing notion that you can make any web-based company/endeavor work just with ads. Not everyone is entitled to a slice of the pie; I'm not going to stay awake at night wondering if video game bloggers are getting paid to blog about video games or not. Let them eat cake.

Solve the correct problem

[joebagodonuts]

And you lose by being too simplistic and "solving" the wrong problem.

I thought the most insightful exchange was the one in the article - it isn't about ads. Ads, and ad blocking are merely symptoms. It's about choice, or control. I want a say in whether I see an ad or not. I'm a significant part of the interaction. The idea of consumer that holds in the world of TV doesn't map well to the online world.

I have the ability to block ads. Using that ability doesn't make me immoral, dishonest, or any other disparagement I've see thrown around. It levels the playing field. Advertisers, website owners and I are informally negotiating a partnership of sorts, and I have much more say in the negotiation online than I do in other mediums. I'd be a fool to not use that power. Most importantly, I (and many others like me) *will* use that power.

The sites that figure out how to balance the control/dignity equation between their advertising partners and their viewer partners will do well.

It's not an easy problem to solve, but it is *the* problem. Not ad blocking.

Do like GiantBomb

[HalAtWork]

Place only unobtrusive ads, and offer SD videos and podcasts free to all, while keeping HD videos and extra content behind a paywall (mostly non-gaming behind the scenes just-for-fun fanservice). Or do like IGN and theme your site with a developer's game around the launch period and cater to almost every gamer niche with podcasts/videocasts. GameFaqs offers a survey every day and sells consumer metrics (but they have a lot of good will and most people don't lie on the surveys).

And maybe pick better ad partners? If your fans are blocking you then you must be doing something annoying.

Spend what where????

[SuperKendall]

Your cost of living is 9% to 12% higher because of Marketing. I think that if we took the money spent on ads and gave it to content creators instead

This is a horribly flawed understanding of where money comes from.

In your example, you are implying the flow of money is like:

Consumer->Advertiser
Consumer->Website

The reality for most websites is that it goes like:
Advertiser->Website

For most people money never enters into the equation when using a website. So what do you think happens when "the money spent of ads goes to content creators"? By that you mean ads are gone. Now the consumer is still spending nothing, but the website also has no income anymore, and has to close. How did that help anyone?

Advertising so far is the best of a bunch of bad choices. The only other model I can see working is one where it's so easy to pay for content that people actually do so, rendering a tip jar as a viable means of support.

Affiliate links also work as well but really that's just a more subtle form of advertising.

Game site posts crappy content, complains.

[argStyopa]

Here are their first 3 stories at this moment:

Teenage Pokemon: [Teenage Pokemon is a cartoon show about Pokemon in their middle stage of evolution -- we're all wasted. New episodes every week.]
This is an article about a cartoon show.

Sup Holmes :[Destructoid's Director of Communications Hamza Aziz asked Jonathan Holmes to make a show called 'Sup, Holmes?' so that Destructoid could later sell a t-shirt that says 'Sup, Holmes?' on it. This is that show. Subscribe ... more] So, this is an article about a response to an article.

Ten golden rules of online gaming: "..Here's our most popular article from January 2009..." Really? Something from 2009?

Re:Game site posts crappy content, complains.

[Stan92057]

Well its not content YOU would like but it is a gaming site and those games you mentioned are popular among the younger crowd. Its not the only articles they have. The problem is that they use annoying ads "And think its OK" and everything to get the user to view ads that is the problem not the content.

My ad revenue went UP when I removed ad servers.

[dannydawg5]

I stopped using ad servers, and my ad revenues went up. How did I do this?

I ripped out the Google ads and made myself manual text links to Amazon with my affiliate code.

Here is an example from one of my sites:
http://paydowncalc.com/

Adblock does not block that simple little link. It gets clicked way more often than my normal Google ads ever did. Amazon also pays far better than Google ever paid me.

Also, I have never gotten any complaints about my simple little ad either.

I consider this switch a "win-win".

Re:Bite the bullet.

[PlusFiveTroll]

Eventually, if ad-blocking rates keep going up, almost every place interesting will be forced into the same situation.

And will just continue to be a game of cat and mouse. I'll just use *Adblock Proxy v1.043" that will pretend like it got all the page, and it will spit out a nice, safe, ad free page to me.

Even if you lose 30% of your readership, these people were simply a drain on your bandwidth and were basically expecting everyone else to pay their way.

And if some of that 30% you block was very vocal and used to post links to your site that a lot of non-adblock using customers clicked on your traffic goes down 60%, OH SHI-

Yahoo

[ternarybit]

Interesting. I have a simple domain-based adblocker in place on my pfSense gateway, and Yahoo's ads load because they're hosted on yimg.com. Adblocking would basically disappear if they were simply hosted first-party.

Make an iPad magazine, charge $10 per year

[gig]

I read Tape Op on iPad ($5.99 per year to subscribe, 6 issues) and Rolling Stone ($19.99 per year to subscribe, 24 issues) and some others and the content is better than the Web, the reading experience is better than the Web, and even the ads are better than the Web. An ad will be full page, topical, and dismissed with a swipe if you are not interested. Web ads will show you off-topic ads. Web ads place ads on you instead of the content. You can buy back issues within the magazine, and you get a notification when a new issue arrives. Everything is EASY — everything you want to do is 1 tap or 1 swipe. The experience is so much better than the Web, it is worth paying for, and you don't need to make a username or get out your credit card, and sharing your personal info with the publisher is optional, a box asks you if you wan to share and you say no.

You're paying $50 per month or more to your ISP — you can spend $50 per year on magazine subscriptions and get 60 or more issues of various magazines that you like, and your brain will thank you.

Cheap is better than free. Free always sucks — it's 90% ads, it's closing soon, the content is 100 words you've already read on another site. But cheap is sustainable and can have great content, well-written, well-edited, well-curated. Valuable.

And Rolling Stone has push button audio clips next to music reviews. Sure, they could have done on that on the Web, but they didn't because they'd have to do it multiple times to work around the lack of ISO media support in some browsers, and the content simply doesn't exist outside of ISO MPEG-4. Another example of the Web killing itself.

When the Web started, we thought it would look like CD-ROM in no time. Instead, decades later, the Web looks like a shitty Windows app. Web design is now the art and science of making a document as unreadable as possible. I barely use the Web anymore because there are better options now on a $329 iPad that slips in your jacket pocket and weighs 300 grams and runs 10 hours on a charge.

So these guys need to make an iPad magazine and charge $10 per year and make something that is special and great and sustainable.

Load the ads, but don't show them

[SLi]

I would like an ad-blocker that loads the ads and is otherwise undetectable for the site I'm reading, yet does not display the ads. If that were the norm, we probably wouldn't even be seeing this article, because the site in question wouldn't know which percentage of its users blocks ads and would only have to assume it's roughly the same as for every other site.

This would strangle the most the parties that I loathe the most, i.e. the advertisers. The site would still get their cut for the viewed ads. Granted, it might slowly make web ads a less lucrative business for everybody as advertisers no longer sell anything, but at least it would transfer the harm from the sites I access, which seems backwards to what I want, to the entire web ad business. Yes, it would come with a small cost to me in wasted bandwidth, but I don't mind, especially not when on a good connection.

Before Google

[jago25_98]

It's a good question.
I wonder... how did it work before Google?

I remember people used to use Geocities a lot because it was free. Other than that a lot of people used to make webpages just for fun and enjoyment of sharing something with the world. In the very early days I don't remember there being a lot of ads, not on the bullitin boards either.

Probably not the popular answer!

Still waiting for it to load

[Animats]

Destructoid.com - stuck trying to read assets from "craveonline.com", "bulk2.destructoid.com", etc. When it finally comes up, we get a giant picture from Teenage Pokemon, followed by clips from stories. Plus lots of ads.

Their RSS feed is more readable and loads quickly. Now we get to see the content.

It's just some gamer's blog. "This is my favorite episode so far." "There's not a whole lot of information disclosed on how and when the game will released". "Ten golden rules of online gaming." (the usual excuse for hanging ads on every paragraph.) "We had a delightful little Saturday Morning Hangover this morning, playing the recently released Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds." No insights. No inside information. Not even good trip reports.

Why should this guy expect to make money for writing a personal blog about his hobby?

Reduce the ads by 50%

[overmoderated]

Saves bandwidth.

Why do people block ads?

[Millennium]

Most people don't block ads just to block ads. They block ads because of one egregious practice or another: tracking, annoyance, or outright rendering sites unusable.

The answer, then, is simple: no tracking, no audio, no popups, no Flash. Pledge not to use ads that do these things, and ask to be whitelisted. People will do that.

There was a time when these practices actually made ads more valuable, because they would get better response rates: upwards of 5% in some cases, which is freaking astounding for advertising. But if ad-blocker usage is really getting that prevalent -upwards of 50% for tech sites, so probably more like 10% for the general Internet- advertisers are washing away the potential gains from these practices. The consumer simply won't stand for these practices in enough numbers to make them worthwhile, and so it is time to abandon them.

Ad vendors and Ad fiends

[kfsone]

I held out until Feb of this year before finally having to install an ad-blocker. Sure, a site like demonoid was relatively good about it's allotment of ad-space. The trouble is that most of the ad vendors are coke-fiends; the coke is money-for-ad-space. They get you hooked, and then they dial back the revenue and "work with you" to find a way to drive revenue up again. Or rather, increase their margin and get you back to what they were originally paying you. Which is why it always involves more, bigger, more aggressive ads, and never toning it down.

The next step: Total integration

[kheldan]

I know nobody will likely see this comment because there are already >500 comments on this article, but I'll take the time to post it anyway.

The next step? Complete integration of ads into site content. I've already seen it in a few places. You design your site so no actual content is viewable unless javascript and Flash are enabled by the viewer, and the ads are mixed in with the actual content in such a way that you can't separate the two out without completely breaking your ability to see the site. I've seen it already, and it's not prevalent, but I think it's just a matter of time.

Advertising is thought pullotion.

[Snufu]

If your business model depends on polluting my mind, I will do without. For example, this is why I and many others do without a television.

Life is too short.

Re:I happily block ads, and will continue to do so

[0111 1110]

Only until ad blockers figure a way around the ad blocker detector. I've seen sites that ask me to disable my ad blocker before entering. Unless it is life or death information that only they have I will simply go elsewhere.

tragedy of the commons

[Tom]

They should've wondered this before.

Why do we use AdBlock? Because the web without is intolerable. The fuckers who made it so are the ones you should be complaining to.

Ok, that won't help you now that things are the way they are. But here's what you (as the owner of an individual site) can do: Learn! Don't make the same mistake again. Your solution is not more are "higher-value"(*) advertisement. Your solution is less advertisement.

Heck, why is Google Search an online advertisement Goliath? Because the ads are tolerable, they don't distract from the actual task I visit the site for and *gasp* they might actually be relevant. Yes, they do lots of tracking and all that, I didn't say they are perfect. But copy the concept of "less, unobtrusive ads".

It's not just online, btw. - offline advertisement is taking the same route, just slower. There is more of it and it's more distracting (moving, blinking, animated, whatever technology allows). And there is the same counter-movement, though again, slower. But look here:
http://www.newdream.org/resources/sao-paolo-ad-ban
http://youtu.be/Vta6Cn_dLTE

(*) which is an euphemism for "more obnoxious and/or more tracking"

Re:My ad revenue went UP when I removed ad servers

[0111 1110]

I agree with you. That single line of text is sufficiently unobtrusive that I don't care about blocking it. Assuming I even could. Obviously 99.99999999999999% of ads are nothing like that. Rather than whine about it the site in this article could just switch to ads that the combination of adblock plus lite and noscript (probably the most common setup) doesn't stop.

Re:Traditional ads lost their effectiveness anyway

[0111 1110]

I also am less likely to purchase a brand that is advertising on the internet with some kind of banner ad. I agree that it can make them seem cheap. The only time it doesn't bother me is when a company is sponsoring some kind of specialist forum, but I still don't want to see a banner ad for them. Just a text link to their website is more than enough. I also only click on sponsor links, not on regular ads. That would be encouraging spam and is wrong.

I do not block ads - but this whole site I block

[Arker]

Seriously, I dont use anything to block ads specifically. I just block cross-site scripts and similar nonsense. That tends to whack the particularly obnoxious ads, of course.

This website, at any rate, doesnt even load for me - nothing there. That might be their sign.

Just ask, then be polite.

[Sarusa]

I take ad blocking off for good sites that request it.

And then if they ever serve up a large animated, pop-up, sliding, flash, java, or autoplay sound ad I turn it back off with a note never to turn it back on.

Flattr addresses this problem

[Velimir]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Flattr which was made to address this exact problem. Of course, the issue with Flattr remains that it is opt-in so only those that really care will use it, and a low user base will mean content creators don't put Flattr buttons on their websites.

I block some because

[slashedteddy]

Assorted ad networks has been used as attack vectors to spread trojans and whatnot.
That is one reason I block some of them.
Additionally, I block any ad network that shows a particularily annoying ad, such as those that uses sound (I don't like to be surprised in that manner).

Otherwise ads are quite ok as long as they keep from using sounds (and heavy blinking).

pentathletes don't eat deep fried Mars bars

[epine]

Track stars aren't the only athletes in this world. My brain hits the gym for at least three hours every day, rain or shine, and this goes back since peewee league.

Just imagine that the athlete lives in a world where all the food is available free of charge, but in order for the restaurants to stay in business, they depend on customers gobbling down free Mars bars from giant bowls placed just inside the entrance. Turns out there's some kind of additive in the Mars bars that influences a person's future behaviour in some way that accrues profit to somebody who actually pays for the manufacture and distribution (including the free food subsidy) of all those Mars bars. But let's ignore that.

What's an athlete supposed to do? If you don't eat the Mars bar, you're cheating the proprietor. If you do eat the Mars bar, kiss your athletic excellence good fucking by.

Well, I've invested about half my conscious life over the four and a half decades since I reached the age of making my own decisions to keeping my brain relatively unburdened by the coagulating poison of cultural cholesterol.

There was a year in my teens where I became depressed about my schooling (where the only learning involved knowing when and discovering how to avoid my toxic schoolmates). During this year I watched a lot of stupid television. Then I came to my senses and said "Why the fuck am I wasting my life and destroying my brain?"

I haven't subscribed to cable TV as an adult ever since. All you have is this tiny gasket between your brain--your second favourite organ--and any damn infomercial filth included in your basic service whether you want it or not. At 3:00 a.m. after a bad day and not being able to sleep this tiny gasket fails you. You thumb twitches once to change the channel, but not immediately twelve more times to change the channel to anything a sane person would consider worth watching. For some people, this gasket blows out completely, and it fails them before they've even finished their breakfast.

I'll dump my ad-blocker just as soon as society puts a restraining order on cognitive filth, and not one minute sooner. Of course, everyone has their own personal definition of cognitive filth. Like everyone else, I'll register my views on the official Cognitive Filth Restraint Registry. But then, like any athlete, my list of banned foods will be longer than most.

Words to live by: If you won't put it into your body, don't put it into your mind. Not even if someone else pockets a nickel in the exchange.

Well obviously

[lightknight]

Well obviously you need to fight back, in the form of more irritating ads that last longer and are more eye-popping, as both some form of punishment and to convince the few still not using ad-blockers to spend more, making up for the others' thrift.

I'm seeing something like Flash^3, complete with two mandatory surveys and ten minutes worth of video ads, per site visit. No, make that per page. Meanwhile, you can launch a subversive campaign 'educating' people about how when their friends use ad-block, artists / web site owners / content providers don't get their cut, and are endangering their access to their freemium content (because the web wasn't worth visiting before '95, right?). Perhaps you can form some sort of lobbying group to get congress to pass a bill making use of ad-blockers illegal? Or that every adult / child over a certain age has to be subjected to a certain amount white-noise style spamvertisement, in the interests of keeping our consumption based economy on track? Oh, and be sure to get the 'soft' science types to update their book of labels, so anyone not wishing to partake in this will be considered anti-social or something. That's a good society, run along now.

Your 'right' to send me ads ends...

[arthurh3535]

... right at my computer and before I see it if there is any (to a .0001%) chance that your ad might send malicious software (including tracking cookies/flash objects) to my computer or if they are so intrusive that I can't read/watch what I'm there to do.

If you don't want to police your ads, that's not my fault. You are the ones abusing people.

We are just not standing for that abuse.

So go away.

Ah yes, the same old argument

[itchybrain]

The convenient, running argument seems to be :

I like the product but I disagree with the price of admission. Therefore, I am justified to obtain the product through other means.

Does the option to just walk away ever cross anyone's mind?

hmmm, I wonder

[Darcojin]

How about using less invasive adds, don't auto play video and audio, pop-ups, stealth malware installers, don't let the meat upwards of half of the sites interface, etc. ; that would be a great start .

Re:Maybe Make less annoying ads?

[fyngyrz]

Well... maybe.

They overdid it

[gweihir]

And by "they" I mean the web-sector in general. My personal policy is this: If it is obnoxious (blinking, animation), I block it. The rest I just ignore and do not look at. For pop-ups, banners, etc. I either stop visiting the site or do an IP block (the opera browser supports that).

The whole online-marketing thing is stupid, with people believing they could get rich like Google. Well, guess what: Google only got rich because the ads on their pages are non-intrusive and targeted and because they sell ads to people that hope to get rich. The second is a bit like people selling "spam" kits. It is a bit like TV ads: All they do is make people mad. Then they remember the people that mad them mad and that is what the advertisers use as "performance" metric, i.e. brand recognition. This only benefits the advertising companies, not those paying for the ads.

Ads are always unpleasant

[Anonymous Coward]

I find advertisements to be deeply repulsive, no matter how unobtrusive they are. And when some particularly resilient advertisement makes its way through my blocks, I think my time is well spent if it takes me 15 minutes to track down how to block it (though it usually takes much less). Advertisement is psychological warfare, mind-hacking. Advertisers study psychology to find out how to bypass your rational decision process and make you buy things you do not need. As much as I hate advertisements, I don't think advertisers would actually want me to look at ads anyway. I certainly don't feel bad about blocking them - it feels pretty good actually, making a small part of the world better by ridding it of advertisements, even if it is just my computer. If I could, I would get rid of them everywhere.

Hilarious - Go NoScript

[aybiss]

The site in question tries to load content from no less than 13 other domains. How were people stupid enough to use it in the first place?

one kind of good advert

[Chirs]

telling me about something that I don't realize exists, but could use.

If I don't know it exists, I can't research it.

Advertisers, I am curious....

[tlambert]

Advertisers, I am curious.... what is the ratio between bandwidth consumed by content vs. bandwidth consumed by the ads?

The thing that pisses me off about most ads is my ISP bandwidth cap on various devices; not strictly a cap, but the knee when it starts costing me more money, or when stuff I want to see more than the ads gets rate-throttled.

One of the reasons I install click-to-flash is that most of this high bandwidth content tends to be flash. Recently, some advertisers have been going to HTML5 to get around click-to-flash, but I'm close to interposing HTML5 content as well, at least for anything with an audio or video tags on it.

Yeah, animations are annoying, even if they are animated GIFs, and video and audio are annoying, but things like Sprint's policy of capping and then intentionally not enforcing the cap - nor any user controllable means of turning one on -- and instead charging buttloads of money per byte after the cap are what's forcing me to block your advertising.

If you want to get around ad blocking, then you need to figure a way to cut the ISPs in on your ad revenue such that your ads do not count against my bandwidth cost/slowdown count.

Good riddance!

[xenobyte]

I block all ads as I've done for the past decades. I currently use AdBlock and NoScript and they efficiently kill just about all ads.

If you want to finance your website, use subscriptions, pay-per-view or proceeds from the sale of physical merchandise. If you want a free section, adjust the fees accordingly. Yes, it's that simple.

Get rid of the tracking please.

[Requiem18th]

What I hate about advertising is that ONLINE ADVERTISERS think that the only way to do it is by raping the customer privacy in a dark alley before killing it. Advertisers in old media dodn't have problems selecting ads. Sell me geek stuff in slashdot. Sell me gadgets on gizmodo. Sell me videogames in reddit /r/Gaming. Sell me things about the site I'm reading. You don't have to know my entire web history to know what ads to show me.

I block ads because they come with a whole bunch of web bugs designed to build a comprehensive psychological profile of me. WTF.

I'm whiling to disable ad-blockers from a whitelist of good behaving advertisers. A whitelist that in no way can contain the likes Google and its immortal cookies or or Facebook and its aliased tracking servers.

Show of hands...

[Cyfun]

Okay, show of hands. How many of you ever click on a banner ad when you're not using ad blocking? I think I've done it a handful of times on accident, but that's aboot it. Aside from possibly some Google AdSense ads, though. But I fail to see how banner ads ever generated anyone much revenue.

The Public are Swine.

[Esperi]

"Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket." – George Orwell

Google depends on ads

[tepples]

If all the websites that can't exist without ads died tomorrow, the internet would be a better place. Some sites that many people use would go away, and they would be replaced by a sampling of other sites that Google would eventually learn to index intelligently.

If all the websites that can't exist without ads died tomorrow, Google would be among them.

I like ads that are awesome

[yanglifu90]

I don't bloack ads, I blocked plug-ins. Ad-blockers: you will find your life easier if you unblock ads because that is how you get infomation about new products and services; and advertisers: stop using Flash plug-in in your ads.

Tracking you to discern your interests

[tepples]

Make the advertisements relevant to the content, my interests, and less the center of attention than the content. Do that, keep out the malware, and you might even get some clicks from me.

But in order to discern "your interests" and distinguish "your interests" from the interests of others viewing the same web site, the ad network needs to track you. Are you OK with tracking if it means you'll get fewer irrelevant ads? I am.

Re:Put it this way: it's been spoilt by the majori

[bhagwad]

If adverts are ruining it, don't visit that site - problem solved!

you can (usually) block house ads

[Cajun Hell]

If you serve the ads yourself, then afaik no ad blockers block them.

Am I the only person who remembers the 1990s? Back before hardly anyone used "ad networks" plenty of us were blocking web ads. It was typically done using proxies rather than browser plugins, but either way, the user's capabilities are about the same.

And if I recall, image dimensions were often a big clue the software used. For example, if you have an img tag with width=728 height=90, that image is an ad, period. You don't care what host is in the src attribute; the dimensions are enough. And if example.com happens (for their own convenience) to use helpful keywords in their path names, (img src="http://example.com/ads/ad12345.jpg") then all the better.

Maybe today's ad blockers are deliberately dumber about such things, perhaps even for the purpose of encouraging sites to run house ads, in order to foster a more responsible web. And if that's the case, cool. But let's not kid ourselves by saying that house ads are unblockable. At most, house ads come with one fewer clues. among several, that software can use to determine they're ads.

Vehicle as a broader concept

[tepples]

In that case, how would the concept of a "vehicle" as a broader concept than a horse-drawn carriage end up in such a person's research? I remember hearing on a TV documentary that the railroads declined in part because they failed to realize that they weren't in the railroad industry as much as the transportation industry.

Geographic spread of a product

[tepples]

Everyone would have become aware of them because they'd see them on the road.

Learning about a product's existence by seeing it in use in public is limited to the physical places that one typically goes in a day. In the horse-drawn era, that wasn't very far. How would the first few people in a given geographic area find out about horseless carriages?

Re:Geographic spread of a product

[BasilBrush]

Learning about a product's existence by seeing it in use in public is limited to the physical places that one typically goes in a day. In the horse-drawn era, that wasn't very far.

You didn't have to go and see horseless carriages, horseless carriages came trundling past you.

Re:Geographic spread of a product

[tepples]

You didn't have to go and see horseless carriages, horseless carriages came trundling past you.

Only if an existing user of a horseless carriage lived near you.

Sure, we have the Internet today. But if ad-supported venues of word of mouth promotion such as Facebook were to disappear, what venues of word of mouth promotion would people who had previously relied on Facebook use instead?

Re:Geographic spread of a product

[BasilBrush]

1. Things spread. Just today in the article about warming in the north. It was pointed out that earthworms are now making an appearance where previously permafrost prevented them. The earthworms are sightless, and needed no advertising.

2. Word of mouth was happening on the internet before Facebook, and before any commercial entities were there.

3. Advertising only serves those who are placing the ads and those that are paid to place them. They are not a public good, and we should do precisely nothing to enable them. Some forward thinking cities have banned billboard advertising. It hasn't damaged the economy, it's just made the places more pleasant.

Re:I happily block ads, and will continue to do so

[intnsred]

Yes, exactly. If some site wants to bar me from using their site because I block their ads, or only allow session cookies, or lobotomize JavaScript -- or whatever -- they're free to do that. I have no problem with that.

For example, I refuse to read NYT articles that require me to create an account. I feel not only is the NYT overrated, but the overzealous way they track users means I'd rather not use their "service". Ditto for Facebook, once aptly described as a surveillance service disguised as a "fun" social network.

More and more people are going to have to decide whether they're sheep being led to the slaughter, sacrificing their privacy, attention (in the case of ads), and forced to do this or that because some "service" wants this, or whether they're actual customers or consumers with real rights and the ability to make decisions. IMO since the Internet was privatized/corporatized after the 1990s telecomm act, the pendulum has swung way too far towards users being considered sheep for exploitation.

As Andrew Lewis bluntly put it: "If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold."

Re:What they want isn't always what they want

[tepples]

Automakers who conducted "thorough and independent testing of cars v.s horses" would still have had to publish the results of said testing in an advertisement.

3/4th internet exists due to ads, better off gone.

[yenic]

If only the crap on TV that's ad supported (and a subscription on top of that) disappeared, we'd be left with non-profit groups like PBS and other sources of non-profit programming. That would be a massive improvement as we moved from quantity to quality.

If the 3/4th of the internet that exists only due to ads disappeared, we'd live in a better world. In both cases, we'd move to enthusiast/hobbyist creations which would focus on content, not sensationalism.

Anyone reading this, please enable your adblocker (and disable the 'allow non-intrusive advertising' option).

From an (ex) gaming site operator

[Hackysack]

We've seen this all happen before.

Back in 1999, I co-founded allakhazam.com A gaming database site which was specific to one game, and eventually grew to cover others. We witnessed the complete collapse of the online ad industry in 2000/2001, and as a result we worked very hard at establishing alternative monetization strategies. It worked, it worked very well, and in 2006 we sold the company doing very well as a result.

I then spent 3 years arguing against focusing on an Ad-focused revenue model, and renewed focus on the user experience.

Ad focused revenue models on websites are lazy, and very very broken. With a couple minor exceptions, most people are not swayed by the presentation of random imagery on the sides of the page they're trying to look at. Tech savy users either block the ads in the browser or they are just used to the ads and block them out internally. Most sites use 3rd party ad networks to sell the ads they're going to display, and as a result we get useless context-free ads displaying at the wrong time in a users day. Ads for Hyundai cars are pretty useless to someone reading a video game review for example.

Furthermore, having an ad-focused revenue model means that your customers are not your users. Your customers are now the ad networks or your directly sold advertisement. Your users are just a means to getting your customers to pay you more, and as a result the users often find that their user experience degrades. From articles which take multiple clicks across many pages, to invasive and irritating advertising, to vending of the users browsing habits, negatively impacting the user experience results in dollars for the operator.

Switching to a subscription model allows you to focus on developing content for the users as your customers. You no longer need to have the dichotomy of negatively impacting your users for money. Now you want to please them with a positive user experience, good compelling features and content. Good content is hard though. There are 10001 bloggers out there willing to write content for nearly nothing to free. So you can't assume that putting up a couple articles a week is going to be enough reasoning to get people to subscribe. Also many sites over value the value of a subscription. Make it small and I might be interested ($3/month), if you're going to charge me $20/month you're probably not going to get my money at all.

Subscription revenue is rewarding though. We had 50,000 subscribers paying us $3/month. We strove to constantly add features to the subscribed users. Ad revenue wasn't even a shade of that, despite doing over (at that time) 5 million uniques / day.

Intrusive ads get blocked by host...

[BeCre8iv]

and so it should be. dont like it? stop with the audio and flashsurbation.

I had no problem with adds until they became anima

[Billgatez]

I had no problem with adds until they became animated or had sound ( Any one rember those smiley adds ) or poped up over the information you were looking at forcing you to click a tiny close button. The worst are pages where you go to download something, and the download button is hidden with in a bunch of adds that have click to download buttons on them to.

How to bootstrap word of mouth?

[tepples]

So how should someone who is introducing a new product initiate this spread without any advertising?

Re:How to bootstrap word of mouth?

[BasilBrush]

Your constant questions bore me. It's like you have no opinion of your own.

Rephrased as a non-question

[tepples]

Your constant questions bore me. It's like you have no opinion of your own.

Nobody is born with an opinion. I try to sample a range of opinions and inquire further where I foresee a potential problem with holding and acting on a particular opinion. Please allow me to rephrase it as a non-question:

It is unclear to me how how someone should who is introducing a new product initiate the spread of a product through word of mouth without any advertising.

Re:Effective for now, but short sighted...

[computererds]

Goastery will block all those external probes from anyone you choose. Facebook's bullshit is exactly why I went and found that one. (It being the best of the ones I tried.)

Advertisers are certainly to blame

[Trogre]

Advertisers are to blame for this, but not for the reason you might think.

The problem comes when an advertiser, aware of what can be done with HTML, animated GIFs, Flash, and remembering their marketing classes where they learned the importance of grabbing eyeballs, makes an obnoxious high-impact ad that screams for your attention and buys space on a web page you visit. Then someone else, to remain competitive, makes another high-impact ad on the next page you visit. Until they're on nearly every web page you visit.

So you block them.

Ad blocking comes about when people want to see content without invasive ads. We don't have time or inclination to screen every ad to see how offensive it is, so we just block them all. Advertisers notice this and stop "sponsoring" the web sites since they're not getting the eyeballs they want. So now web sites are short on revenue and blaming people with ad-blockers.

Many web sites are run by businesses, and without some kind of revenue stream, they're going to simply shut up shop. Non-business ones also need some way of paying the bills, unless the site is hosted gratis by another entity. Ad-free Wikipedia needs an annual donation drive to keep it going, a model that is unlikely to work for everybody. So I have no problem with sites having ads per se.

Sites like Slashdot do advertising very well, and I do not block their ads (even though I get a checkbox allowing me to do so apparently for my "contributions" to this site). They're not invasive, they don't claim I have won some imaginary prize, they don't try to run Flash or DHTML and chew up CPU cycles.

In fact, the only ads I block are Flash (thanks to the FlashBlock extension). I figure any company stupid enough to use Flash for its ads doesn't deserve my business.

Why I use adblock...

[djnforce9]

So here is my take on the matter. I fully understand that numerous websites such as Destructoid provide a lot of free (quality) content to viewers yet their servers come with increasing operation costs and therefore, ad revenue is a necessity to keep the site running without demanding a premium charge first. The same goes for several other websites. The problem is that I have encountered way too many highly abusive ads that I came to the point where I didn't WANT to shut adblock off nor do I want to go fishing through each site I visit and only enable adblock manually when they go overboard. I would rather preventative measures instead.

Point in case. I was at my brother's place and he needed help installing a Minecraft mod. I went to its download page and was bombarded with at least 5 gigantic download buttons and guess what? All of them were fake and were placed as a trap in order to get a free ad click from anyone who just wanted to download the mod. That is deceptive! Needless to say, I became very frustrated from being sent all over the place so installed Adblock on his machine soon after. After returning to the page, I eventually found the REAL download link "tucked away" BUT you had to give them a facebook like, tweet, etc just to view it. Don't believe me? See it for yourself and you'll know what I mean: http://www.minecraftmine.org/minecraft-1-0-0-modloader-1-0-0-mod/

THIS is the kind of crap that I couldn't stand prior to installing Adblock on my own machine. I've also come across ads that would slow down my machine (due to being a poorly coded flash banner), play obnoxious music, spawn a popup that abuses the unLoadEvent function thereby displaying a dialog box before it will close, or even attempt a browser hijack to change my default search provider or a drive by malware installation. Then there are the video streaming sites like Youtube which throw in half a minute commercials not just at the beginning but sometimes in the MIDDLE of a video as well which ends up being extremely loud compared to the video itself and therefore hurts my ears (I use headphones and yes I know that only partner videos have ads but hopefully you get the point I am making). I am sorry but enough is enough!

It's really nice that Destructoid heavily monitors what advertisers' banners appear but some sites just let it go way out of control and I have no way of knowing this until I hit the site. Therefore, to save myself a LOT of frustration, Adblock is going to have to stay on until the worst of ads are abolished (which does not seem very likely unfortunately). Text ads like what Google uses I could tolerate as well as small non-intrusive banners. In fact, Adblock HAS an option to allow "non-intrusive" ads and this is ON by default. Perhaps more sites should work towards only displaying those and perhaps less ads will be blocked. Only the REAL ad loathers would enable that options as well. Also, there are sites that just flat-out refuse Adblock users by inserting a script to halt all traffic that has it installed. If they really get desperate, they could do that too although I find this approach to be quite hostile.

Where is Google in this discussion?

[thethirdwheel]

I can't believe we're having an argument about the usefulness of ad supported web businesses with barely any mention of Google. Dear everyone, where do you think their money comes from? If there were no ads on the internet there would be no google and no facebook and no twitter, to name just a few. Maybe you can live with that, but it's hard to say that they aren't adding value or providing services that people like. The truth of the matter is that hardly anyone cares about ads, especially if they aren't obnoxious interstitials or flash spam and every once and a while you see something you like which is a win win. Run adblock if you like, but there's just no case for a crusade against advertising based revenue models. Those are the revenue models that support that suppor the services we love on the internet.

Re:Adblock = inferior to custom hosts files

[argStyopa]

Great overview, if a little histrionic.
Correct me if I'm wrong, though: to generate blocked IPs in a custom hosts file, don't I have to know those IP's in the first place?

Ie, don't I have to have been bitten by that dog (or at least know he's vicious) to know I want to ban him from my house?

One of the adblock advantages (and I grant, they're not perfect) is that they ALREADY have built this list.

(I hope that despite posting AC, you come back and reply.)

The question wasn't ethics, it was "why ads"

[raymorris]

You offer it for free. I take it for free. What is unethical about that?

Who said anything about "unethical"? The question was "why ads instead of donations / voluntary payments?" The answer is because people do not, in fact, donate to web sites, software, etc. in other than a very few exceptional cases. Therefore, ads are used.

Didn't say immoral. Just answers "why ads?"

[raymorris]

But he offered the Shareware for free and people took it for free. And now he is telling that everybody is immoral because they took the free offer and don't give him money.

Who said anything about "immoral"? The question was "why ads instead of donations / voluntary payments?" The answer is because people do not, in fact, donate to web sites, software, etc. in other than a very few exceptional cases. Therefore, ads are used. I didn't say anything about moral or immoral. I said web sites have ads because people don't pay.

But he offered the Shareware for free and people took it for free.

By the way, it wasn't offered for free, just easily stolen. It was more of a guarantee, "Sample it first and don't pay if you're not satisfied, on the honor system".
It seems virtually everyone was happy with the software (great reviews, thankful emails, etc.) yet 0% paid. I would NOT have been surprised if 80% of happy customers never clicked the button to pay the $5 via PayPal. However, With 100,000+ downloads, I would have expected at least one per ten thousand to honor their agreement. Nope. Only in A HUNDRED THOUSAND clicked the button.

Re:Didn't say immoral. Just answers "why ads?"

[devent]

You mean on the "pay if you really like my software and have spare change and want to go to all the trouble to give me $5 honour system".

But lets go back to the question "why ads instead of donations / voluntary payments?"
Sure you can put up ads, but then don't be surprised that I will block the ads.

I don't really understand the discussion here. For ages the people have made money by either a) work or b) create something of value that other people want to spend money on. You can still do that in the "digital age". Either do contract work, that is what Kickstarter is for example, or create some app that people want to buy. But if you create an app that you want to sell, don't give it away for free and hope for some stupid "honour system/agreement".

Also it's a fundamental right to block ads. So don't be surprised that people will start to block ads if they get too intrusive. Most of the people couldn't care less if 50% or 90% of the web disappears if they block the ads. I couldn't care less if slashdot.org would disappear tomorrow. Sure it would be little bit sad but at the end I would just do something else and would get my news from somewhere else.

Back to your shareware: I told before, nobody have asked for his shareware. It's nice that he wrote it, and it's nice that so many people liked it, but at the end that is not what is important. The important is: did anybody asked him to write the shareware? Since the answer is no, then he should be really glad that at least one gave him money. Since nobody asked him to write the software, he is the petitioner.