Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Why Stack Overflow Doesn't Care About Ad Blockers

Posted by timothy on from the just-wish-it-was-easy-to-block-the-clickbait dept.

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?

3 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. Ad icon in banner? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Does the "AD" icon in the story banner mean this story is an ad? That seems like an unprecedented level of honesty for Slashdot!

  2. Pay-per-click is a broken model by countach44 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If I see an ad for something, it had served its purpose. If a buy a Honda partly because of an ad I saw two weeks ago, but didn't click on, it still worked. Maybe the idea of measuring clicks is that clicks and ad effectiveness are well correlated... but I'm too lazy to find any studies.

    1. Re:Pay-per-click is a broken model by T.E.D. · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The company I work for "has ways" to determine ROI; If you buy a car based on an ad you saw a couple weeks ago, they are fairly good about linking those two events in some fashion or another. People smarter than me are working on it. I just work on some of the mundane configuration side of things. It's a bit frightening how good it is.

      But are you sure those "ways" are actually effective? I've talked to quite a few laymen recently, including last week a successful marketing professional, who were convinced that read-receipts were an effective way to judge when and how many people read the emails they send. The marketing person was even quoting me general statistics based on this.

      But of course not all email clients honor, or even support read receipts. I'm not even sure most of them do. Some folks try to get around this by embedding externally-hosted images, but any good email client shouldn't automatically present those either. So while a "read-receipt" can (probably) be used to tell that some person has at least glanced at your email, they don't really tell you anything about who hasn't.

      What I'm at getting here is that marketing people have a nasty tendency to have completely unwarranted blind faith in their tools, when they don't really understand how those tools work and what their actual limitations are. So I really would take any info from them about tech with a grain of salt, no matter how certain they are about it. In fact, the more certain they are, the more suspicious you should be.