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Why Stack Overflow Doesn't Care About Ad Blockers
Press2ToContinue writes: Forging a bold step in the right direction, Stack Overflow announced today that they don't care if you use an ad blocker when you visit their site. "The truth is: we don't care if our users use ad blockers on Stack Overflow. More accurately: we hope that they won't, but we understand that some people just don't like ads. Our belief is that if someone doesn't like them, and they won't click on them, any impressions served to them will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads to people who won't click on them harms campaign performance. ... Publishers can't win by forcing ads — especially low-quality ads — in people's faces. Think scantily-clad women selling flight deals, weight-loss supplement promos or wacky waving inflatable arm-flailing tube-men promoting car dealerships."
It's possible that this declaration by SO might help to clarify to advertisers that it is the overabundance of low quality ads that practically force the public to seek out ad blockers. But seriously, what is the likelihood of that?
It's ads that pop up and interrupt the browsing experience.
It's ads that masquerade as "facebook notifications" on your phone.
It's ads that start playing a video at fucking maximum volume while you are trying to work.
But most importantly, its ads that are made entirely out of javascript running on MY computer by another entity who has not been vetted or trusted by me. You do not need to run a program on my computer to sell me something.
It's the ads that are for all intents and purposes, malware. Adblocking+Noscript is the most effective antivirus. Accessing the internet without them is negligence. This is what stackoverflow and other sites need to start saying.
I think the whole advertising situation will get better once the tech bubble bursts. Just look at many of the tech companies now - they are giant advertising platforms, but spend most of their revenues and investor money on user acquisition through advertising. This is like a giant ponzi scheme really.
Google worked, and will probably keep working for some time now, because one of the main use cases for search is to find stuff you want to buy. When you go to the site and start searching for a particular product, it isn't a big deal (and sometimes is useful) when ads come up for that product or equivalents you might not have heard off. The advertising has actual value in informing you about what is available. Other sites, such as Facebook, might have more information on me, but I go there to look at pictures of my friend's dogs and kids, not when I want to find something to buy. For that reason I find their ads incredibly annoying, and despite Zuckerberg going on about how they make them relevant, he would only be true if I was some kind of consumption machine that wonders around the internet like a virtual godzilla eating up every product that is shoved in my face.
My prediction is that eventually the industry will fall apart as companies realise the ponzi nature of current advertising prices, and that much of this expenditure is not converting in to sales. In that regard, the better tracking/conversion tools that the internet allows may be the industries own downfall.
If you're complaining about me not watching ads on your site, how about showing me ads FROM your site, not a third party's; and static images and text, no video, no animation, no scripts, no multipage GIFs. Certainly never popups/unders/etc. I do NOT object to static images and text, for which I'm already paying the bandwidth to download.
I'd rather they stopped cluttering up search results and disappeared.
I know it! Geeze, I just had a problem this morning and when I searched for a solution, all these Stackoverflow hits showed up with posts by people solving my problem.
The nerve of these people! BTW, their SEO optimization company is just brilliant!
I think the whole advertising situation will get better once the tech bubble bursts.
You seem curiously convinced that A) we are in a bubble and B) that advertising will go away or "get better". You can't really know A for certain by definition because bubbles generally can only be identified in retrospect and B will never ever happen. It's unclear what "get better" means to you but I'm pretty sure whatever it is won't happen.
My prediction is that eventually the industry will fall apart as companies realise the ponzi nature of current advertising prices, and that much of this expenditure is not converting in to sales.
I think you don't understand the advertising business. You think that companies are naively throwing money at advertising because they don't know any better. While there are some out there where that is true for the most part buyers of advertising understand very well the relationship between advertising dollars spent and the returns they get. It's not at all hard to get a pretty solid idea of the correlation between ad spend and revenue.
...Our belief is that if someone doesn't like them, and they won't click on them, any impressions served to them will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads to people who won't click on them harms campaign performance. ... Publishers can't win by forcing ads — especially low-quality ads — in people's faces. ...
It's not ads per se that are annoying, it's how they affect the browsing experience. Reading Slashdot a few seconds ago - I read one or two sentences of an article, then an image loaded and reformatted the page and the paragraph I was reading disappeared. Found it again, read half a sentence and another image loaded and it disappeared again. I don't have time to chase my article all over the screen. On other sites, I'll read half a paragraph, then it will suddenly wipe everything out (not just scroll it off the screen) while it tries to load some huge object from the network. Or half the page will come down, then stop while it hangs trying to do a DNS lookup or load a giant Flash video from some ad network that's not responding, but none of the remaining text will load while it hangs. This happens so much that I've either stopped reading some sites, or installed ad blockers on computers that I use often. I don't hate the ads - I maybe click on one or two a year - if that's enough to keep things profitable I have no objection. What's unacceptable is the way they negatively impact what I'm actually trying to do.
It's also a pretty naive position. As things stand the difference between people with ad blockers and without isn't how much they hate advertising, it's how tech savvy they are. If IE came with ad blocking by default then (assuming it worked) it's not like its users would be rushing to turn it off, and it's not like those users suddenly went from loving ads to hating them.
It's definitely a good start.
Our belief is that if someone doesn't like them, and they won't click on them, any impressions served to them will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads to people who won't click on them harms campaign performance.
This is a really good point that I haven't seen other sites make. They're right about it, especially the "campaign performance". If 20% of the user base is not going to click on an ad anyway, then why bother padding the numbers to say you served ads to that additional group? Just don't serve them ads, and then your click-through rate improves because you've cut out a chunk of people who aren't going to click on them anyway. That might make the numbers for the overall ad campaign better, which may increase the rates that they can then charge for ads in the future, because they have a higher clickthrough rate.
Therefore: allowing ad-blockers onto your site increases your advertising revenue. Suck it, Forbes.
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