ars technica says ad blocking devastating to sites you love

Many comments re right to freeload, yet no alternatives

[docbird]

Ars Technica has an article explaining how ad blocking can hurt websites - especially techie sites, since their visitors are more likely to know about ad blocking.

Over 1700 comments; checking a small sample, see some sympathy - and some arguments that ars needs a different revenue model, with no real ideas about what this might be. (Other than going behind a paywall...)

Article follows an experiment by ars, in which ad blocking visitors were not served content.

Link to this perhaps ok for webmasterworld:
[arstechnica.com...]

[ppc_newbie]

Just my way of thinking and trying to be fair to both sides.

Probably most surfers running adblockers got hit sometime with a bunch of nasty stuff somewhere. So they go get an ad blocker and all sites get blocked. Good, bad, whatever.

But , as an advertiser I still want the surfers to be able to see my targeted relevant ads, and publishers want to make a few cents also.

So how about splitting the diference between bouncing the surfer and using a paywall.

Maybe only displaying a "snippet" of the content, and requiring the adblocking be turned off, JS enabled for navigation before viewing the rest of the content.

[tangor]

The genie (blockers) is out of the bottle. Unlikely to be put back. The other genie (ads) was rude. Unlikely to be put back. JS is fraught with system compromise. That genie is not going away.

I have no problems with ads...ignore them, but no problems. Burma Shave. :) (look up if you don't get the humor) but the noise level is high, the potential for malware is increased, and service by third parties increases that exposure. My computer is not a TV, Radio, or Newspaper... it is my workplace, a repository of personal information and not some revenue-seeking webmaster's playground.

I am a webmaster just like you guys and gals. I run three sites with giggle's (sic) ad revenue, 1 with bing revenue, and 2 with site direct advertising. Guess which does best? Per Click and Conversion.

There are two camps in this discussion. There's that third group who are doing adverts direct. The kudos I give giggle is they made advertising on the web "okay". It is up to webmasters who want to avoid adblockers or NoScipt to make our advertising logical, reasonable, visible and lacking in annoyance.

[FattyB]

Direct advertising is all very well but if you are say a medium sized site, say 500K - 2 million unique per month, then you are not going to be able to do deal with movie studios, big telcoms and the like for adveritising. To deal direct with big companies you usually need to have tens of millions of uniques, although exceptions depending on the niche.

You will have to go via an agency like Gorilla Nation or Glam who will act on your behalf. They will serve the ads, even if you do serve them after an insertion order then you will do that either via something like openads or some 3rd party adserver service. You have to use something like that as they campaigns need to be tracked, only so many ads shown per visitor plus geo targeted, ads shown at a certain time or by a certain date etc.

I think most adblockers would block anything like the above. In fact even if you served a static jpg with simple html link they would most liekly block it if you happened to call any of your divs ad or any number of names on a very long list.

I'd like the adblocker makers to ID their script so we have the choice of blocking them. That would seem a fair compromise to me.

[Edge]

I'd like the adblocker makers to ID their script so we have the choice of blocking them. That would seem a fair compromise to me.

x2 - giving the site owner a choice to serve pages or not is equitable..

[claus]

ars technica says ad blocking devastating to sites you love

IMHO, ads may be devastating to sites you love. Avoid displaying interstitials, popups, popunders, rich media, and great big JPGs - and less people will block ads.

I really think it's that simple. There's a reason people block ads. It's because ads annoy them.

[londrum]

There's a reason people block ads. It's because ads annoy them.

on certain sites they do, yeah. but why should every other site on the web suffer once they've turned it on?
ad-blockers are like king herod. killing every single kid just to wipe out one little blighter.

[Rosalind]

Direct advertising is all very well but if you are say a medium sized site, say 500K - 2 million unique per month, then you are not going to be able to do deal with movie studios, big telcoms and the like for adveritising.

This tends to suggest that adblockers are going to have a disproportionate effect on small to medium-sized sites. Niche sites already have the odds against them in terms of getting traffic. Time for some consolidation, I think.