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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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).

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

[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!

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.

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?

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: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: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: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.

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

[Tom]

Your mistake was making it available for free, asking for donations and not offering anything in exchange.

I have two different experiences with voluntary payments, both very positive.

One, I've been running an online game for 12 years now where you can donate and in return you get an in-game title and an additional character slot. Nothing that provides in-game benefits and it's mostly for vanity. But it is something. As you can check yourself because I am transparent with it all, players are donating a few hundred Euros every month and have been for years.

Two, I sold a toolkit / extension for the Unity 3D engine on a "pick your own price" model, where you could buy the same product for anywhere between $10 and $50. Only half the buyers choose the cheapest option. Again, I was honest and open about the why and how, including that the package is absolutely identical at all price levels, and that I choose that model because I understand that $50 is too much for a small hobby developer playing around for his own fun. I ended with "this tool will save you many hours of work, you decide what your hour is worth".

People are willing to spend money. But they also want to get a value in return and they want to feel engaged. Allowing people a free download and then asking for a donation does neither. It gives them the value for nothing and doesn't make them participate in the process.

Re: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: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: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: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: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: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.

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.

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.

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.

Gee, I wonder why.

[David Gerard]

http://i.imgur.com/IZDxmzb.jpg

I appreciate the ads that get in people's faces pay more. Until they're blocked.

Re: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.

[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: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: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.

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?

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.

[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.

[__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.

[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.

[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.

[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.