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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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]

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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]

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

[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.

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...

[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...

[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...

[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...

[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.

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

[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.

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

[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.

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 ...

[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 ...

[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.

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

[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!

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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

[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.

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?

[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.

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

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?

[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?

[Anonymous Coward]

They would pay for it out of their own pocket, and accept it as a cost of a hobby they enjoy.

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.'

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

[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

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

[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

[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.

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: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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.