NB: I don’t use ad blocking software on desktops or laptops. I feel that it’s part of my job to experience the Internet as an average Firefox user does, so I dive in, Doubleclick diet pill animations and all. If it weren’t for that, I would be tweaking my browser in a heartbeat. Let me explain.
I read the Ars Technica post, Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love, with interest. I also caught a rebuttal, via a hacker news link. Both of these posts were pretty emo. They got into ethics, families, and well-being pretty quickly.
My favorite example of good advertising is the way Rolling Stone magazine worked when I was a kid. Back then, there was still a recording industry doing a brisk business in plastic stuff, so they would provide at least half of the content you might find in Rolling Stone. The ads were often the best part. I guess fashion magazines like Vogue still work that way. Clearly, there was a lot of care taken in placing the ads next to the right articles, and running ads that readers loved.
Ad blocking software works because there are telltale technical cues that a site isn’t paying the same level of attention to ad content as they are to editorial content (whereas print magazines pay more attention to ad content–that’s how they work). So I think there are solid business reasons for serious content sites to run their own ads, skipping DoubleClick/Google, Federated Media, and all of those remnant networks. The missing link here is the value that those networks provide to advertisers: auditing and other metrics.
Find a way for advertisers to reliably audit site-served ads, and you’ve got yourself a business.
Comments (28)
I’ve seen a few small community sites that do just this, and most of the userbase explicitly supports the ads — even the cheesy or tasteless ones. I’m sure it’s also due in no small part to having relevant ads from other people in the community, rather than a Big Cold Corporation somewhere.
I suppose, personally, I block ads because they’re constantly competing for my attention. In a magazine, they’re kind of annoying, but they’re at least on a separate page. If I don’t care about the product, that’s fine; flip to the next page and read a whole article. On the Web, they elbow their way into content, try to LOOK like content, deliberately sit where I might first glance for content, etc. I’ve read a few “ad optimization” blogs, and these people are honestly trying their hardest to shove their name in my face by any means necessary. Maybe the idea is to annoy me enough that I’ll buy their product in the hopes it will shut them up.
If ads weren’t a constant major irritant, I would have little reason to block them. But they’re actively obnoxious, and they have been obnoxious for years, so they’re all gone. I’m not trying to blame anyone or defend myself; it just seems as natural a solution to me as wearing bug spray while camping.
Online ads are like TV commercials. If I mute the commercial or change the channel am I putting somebody out of business? Hardly.
I block ads for the exact same reason as Eevee. In fact, sometimes I will disable my ad blocker in the hopes that the internet ad industry has gotten a clue, only to find the same irritating pop-ups, fly ins, auto playing videos and audio, absurdly oversized ads, and sensationalist and completely inane junk all over the place.
And then I re-enable the ad blocker.
I would love it if a code of conduct were developed for internet advertisers — something that explicitly banned this kind of shitty behaviour and promised ads that were actually informative and useful. Websites could then promote that they only support advertisers (or advertising services) that follow this code of conduct, and ad blockers should *allow* those sites by default. Then I’d be happy and I wouldn’t have to block ads, and websites would be able to make money. And I would even click on the ads, given they’re useful.
Seems simple, doesn’t it?
I wanted to make this point on some of those articles, but I wasn’t sure how to word it and my posts were getting too long already.
As I posted elsewhere, people block ads because they’re annoying. Now, it’s true: ad blockers tend to be catch-all, killing ads you didn’t even know were there. The solution to that is not making it so easy to tell the ads from the content, so the blockers don’t filter them, and then not making them so annoying, so the users don’t just add to their filters.
The point you’ve made that I overlooked is that this has to be done on the content level, not on the technical level. Yes, you can put the annoying banner images in your own /images directory and give them names with no pattern, such that a machine can’t tell they’re ads. That won’t do. People will just block them individually, block all images, or leave.
Instead, you need to make it difficult for the users to tell the difference, or make them not want to block – by making your ads relevant and enjoyable, instead of trying to cram annoying 8MB animated banners with sound down their throat.
Speaking from experience this is a great idea but not within reach of most content producers. It takes a lot of work to do that level of integration on both sides, and you have to be very good at ad sales to get a client that will make custom stuff for just your site.
It’d be nice if there was an equitable way to do ad blocking and at the same time pay for content. Going to a site a thousand times is probably only going to net them two or three bucks, by the time you’re anywhere near that you’re probably also willing to pay something to support the site with the right services and if reminded appropriately. It sounds shady (illegal?) but maybe there’s a business for subscription ad blocking where the content producers can get paid too (out of the subscription) if they opt-in.
It’s important to read the original article, because the author’s point is that serving the blocked ad incurs bandwidth costs with no chance of revenue. The obvious solution is not to serve the ad content at all to people who are running adblockers (presuming that they can be detected at the server side) because most of such people, if not all of them, are not going to pay attention to, let alone buy from advertisers.
An “ad paywall” experiment was carried out without warning, in which content was denied entirely to users running adblockers.
Interestingly, the author also compares internet ads with TV ads, for which “they really have no true idea who sees what ad, and that’s why it’s a medium based on potential and not results. On the Internet everything is 100% trackable and is billed and sold as such. ”
This may be a real boon to marketers, but many replies bring up the fact that very onerous and pervasive tracking of users is involved. Serving such ads is A BAD THING to anyone who actually understands pervasive user tracking. By comparison, spy agencies and police agencies have a much harder time.
The problem, as many have mentioned, is that advertising is fundamentally broken. Even “carpet bombing” doesn’t work, because as many times as I see Jack’s nonstop ads, I won’t by his fast food.
To paraphrase Ars, “It’s really not right for you ad-blocking folks to deprive us of income we could otherwise make selling your page views to advertisers. We know you won’t buy the advertised products but, just between you and us, we can get away with selling the advertisers false hope because they can’t tell beforehand which page views definitely won’t pan out”. Seriously, I could make the argument quite easily that an ethical website operator has no business charging advertisers for page views he can *know* won’t pay the advertiser (read: ad-blocker folks). Ars and their ilk should be choosing between making users pay for content and charging advertisers only for true sales opportunities. I use an ad-blocker and I’m not going to help Ars or anyone else cook the books. And FWIW, I support Ars right to prevent me from seeing their content if they detect my ad-blocker – I just won’t be visiting them anymore then. A business model based on deliberately offering a no strings attached smörgåsbord of content has sustained them for a dozen years. Isn’t free enterprise grand? Now they want to artificially boost their profits. Leave me out of the conspiracies to defraud please.
A fantastic response that gives real suggestions and expresses real concerns verses “I HATE ADS AND THEY ARE BAD”. Well done.
I’d be interested to see how many of the people that are complaining about Ars have had the experience of running a successful website full time, and paying their bills out of it.
Adblockers legitimately hurt those small businessmen, and I think that AED’s point regarding selling advertisers false hope is a little misleading. Many people who advertise on sites know the game, and know that everybody isn’t going to rush out and buy their product because they’ve seen a banner ad on a website. Brand recognition goes a long way towards legitimising companies, and Pay Per View ads have this purpose in mind. As there is no real way of determining what percentage of your site is using AdBlock technology, even the most ethical operator cannot provide reliable figures of page views.
I agree that Internet advertising is fundamentally broken though in it’s current format, and a change is needed. Everybody hates those movie ads, or ads with sound, yet people are asking why it isn’t more like TV – where the ads are all moving and with sound! People will pay more attention to something that does something to attract their attention, as silly as that sounds.
We want interesting advertisements, yet we don’t want them to move or distract us in any way. That’s a bit of a contradiction really.
I personally use Google Ads on my site, as they seem to be the least annoying, though have recently started to move to a PayPal based ‘donation/feature’ service. I provide the content and ask people out of the goodness of their heart to donate $1 if they can afford it, on whatever timescale they like. If they donate, they get access to tiny features that make the site a little easier to use; nothing major, just email notifications, content tracking, etc. AdBlocking users are still welcome to read and digest the content, though I’m entirely relying on people’s willingness to pay $1 to make their site experience a tiny bit easier. AdBlockers can do everything that donaters can do, but it may take them 5 clicks, where a donator could do it in one, for example.
The way I look at it, if my content is interesting enough to them and my estimation of my target audience is correct, I should still break even without getting on the nerves of people. Whether this proves true though, is too early to tell.
Simple solution I adopted years ago, I stopped reading newspapers and magazines. I also don’t regularly watch TV.
Swordy said “Adblockers legitimately hurt those small businessmen”. Repetition doesn’t make something true, but it’s that ‘legitimately’ part that really jumps out at me. People using ad blockers is a pre-existing condition of the market those small businessmen chose to enter. If their business plan did not allow for that, why should anyone else now be on the hook to bail them out? Are they owed success? Fishing restrictions legitimately hurt commercial fishermen. that doesn’t make them wrong.
Swordy also said “As there is no real way of determining what percentage of your site is using AdBlock technology, even the most ethical operator cannot provide reliable figures of page views”. I wonder how Ars did its experiment in blocking content only for ad-blockers then? Doesn’t matter. Ars is complaining they don’t get paid for ads not seen, so there’s no ethical problem there *until* Ars asks the very viewers they *know* won’t respond to ads to start loading those ads in order to inflate the numbers they’ll bill advertisers for. I’d be interested to hear from advertisers as to whether they think that’s a good idea.
You make a fair point regarding brand recognition, Swordy – there is indeed an effect even on those who would otherwise block such ads. For me it works like this. Ads that show up where I do not want them irritate me. That irritation translates to a lower opinion of the advertised brand and the website operator. Again, any advertisers out there want to be charged for that?
Look, I have no problem with advertising as a business model at all. I could even see myself using it, if I thought it would work for me. But I cannot fathom wanting to impose it on those who react negatively to it. Most of the population doesn’t mind ads enough to do anything to prevent seeing them. So show it to them and be happy they exist in such large numbers. Be grateful that ad-blockers provide a graceful means to avoid brand damage to you and your advertisers. Everybody wins.
1: Aren’t most adverts nowadays actually sold on the basis of “pay per click” and *not* “pay per view” ?
Given the ( reasonable ? ) assumption that those who block such adverts had no intention of clicking on them anyway, are websites genuinely losing *any* income from these ads being blocked ?
2: “blocked ad incurs bandwidth costs with no chance of revenue”
erm… as I understand it, AdBlock Plus *prevents* blocked elements from being downloaded at all… ( although the ad blocker for Google Chrome does apparently work on the basis of download-and-then-prevent-display rather than prevent-download-at-source )
Disclaimer:
I run AdBlock Plus in Firefox, but refuse to block all ads. I block those I personally find the most objectionable.
“Both of these posts were pretty emo. They got into ethics, families, and well-being pretty quickly.”
Ken did not frame his article in this way. His point was simple. “Blocking Ads is harmful to sites you love.” In fact he comes right out and says:
“I am not making an argument that blocking ads is a form of stealing, or is immoral, or unethical, or makes someone the son of the devil.”
The reason families get brought up is because we are a tightknit groupe of friends who’ve built this site and when our budget shrinks, we feel it hard and our families feel it.
I’m not going to sit her and try to tell you that display-ads are the solution. If any of us had an real chance at replacing that revenue with something better we’d take it at the drop of a hat.
That’s part of the reason we’re doing the Ars Premier subscription thing[1], which lets people pay us directly for the hard work we do and cut out the advertising middle-men.
We really do think there’s a better way to finance great, online original content and we’re banking on the fact that people agree with us on that point. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean we can eliminate traditional ads today, or next month, or even next yet. But I think its happening slowly and we’ll get there some day.
1: http://arstechnica.com/subscriptions/
Chiming in from Ars Technica briefly just to respond to this comment, because it’s a really common misunderstanding:
“1: Aren’t most adverts nowadays actually sold on the basis of “pay per click” and *not* “pay per view” ?”
Ars Technica’s ads are sold on a “per view” basis. As part of this conversation we had on ad blocking we found that many of our readers assumed that if they never planned on clicking on ads that it wouldn’t hurt us to block them. That’s simply not true. Our readers are great, and people came out of the woodwork to announce that now that they understood how it worked that they were whitelisting us to support us.
I’ll leave it to others to decide if we’re too emo.
- Aurich (Ars Technica staff)
To all advertisers:
If you want that I watch your ads… don’t fry my CPU with your flashcrap!
Until then I’m using ads-blockers.
Ads are good as far as they are placed well and well targeted. Issue is, google can’t dictate how you place ad. And There is no ranking says “Good site with few ads”. I see some sites where Ads hijack content. How about google making a rank engine for ad and Adblock plus adding a sync with them. So, block ads from site where its poorly designed. Yes…Advertising on web is really broken. But same is the case with TV. Many annoying scrollers, Inset content with huge Ads. Same is with regional radio stations. So solution, since i cant’ have ADP there…I switch (And some times…switch off). Ultimately looser is content provider.
The problem is that the Ars article really rings false – the only ad I saw on their home page this morning was for GQ. What does GQ have to do with technology, and why would it appeal to Ars’ readers? The answer is it doesn’t – Ars is merely shilling for corporate parent Conde Nast, and not providing targeted advertising that might truly be useful to their readers.
The comment above about moving versus static ads misses a very important point. I don’t mind a 5 or ten second commercial before a web video starts, because the media is the same (video). However, eading web sites is more like reading a newspaper or magazine, and the advertising should reflect the activity, in this case be serving static ads.
Anthony, I tend to agree. Seriously, if it were Clint, Aurich, Jackie, and Ben’s tech site, I’d not only whitelist their site, but gladly pay for a subscription to keep them going. But come on, its part of the Condé Nast empire-and like most old school medla players, they have shown that they are tone deaf to the changes that digital has brought. I have a difficult time feeling sympathy for that monolith.
If Condé Nast Digital were serious about the web, they’d follow Rob’s advice above; focus on your own ad network, without Flash, without the cheesy stuff tech people abhor, and focus on your unique audience.
Well said, Aed @ March 6th, 2010 at 11:51 pm
Agree with flash crud. If flash didn’t bring my machine to a halt, I wouldn’t block it. Only ads show up and do lame stuff on my machine without me asking. I am less likely to pay attention to an annoying add. I do click on ads from sites when I choose to look at them.
On the topic of web video ads, I often find that these are the most annoying of all ads purely because of the timing of regional restriction checks. I can think of dozens of times I have sat through a 20-30 web video ad, only to then be told, “sorry, you can’t watch this clip outside the US”. To me, that feels like the ultimate ad view cheap-shot.
Web video providers need to do the regional check, _then_ serve the ad. Not the other way around.
I always spit the seeds out of watermelon, don’t you?
The problem is that the Ars (or any site) is not valuable or unique enough for most anyone to want to endure useless ads they’ll never click on anyway. The brutal fact of life is, if Ars goes out of business we’ll read those few articles on other sites. And if they go out of business too, we’ll move on again. And if the content everywhere is then mostly unoriginal, low-quality scraped material and we’re all worse off, well, that’s exactly where we’ll be and we’ll still block ads whenever possible because we hate them and always will.
Ars is asking for charity now, exactly the same as asking for donations. If it works for them, great, but I doubt it will to any significant degree. (I turned off adblocking to check their ads and saw none, then remembered my old hosts file must be blocking them anyway.)
@anthony.
GQ doesn’t have much to do with technology.
But it has a ton to do with men (Gentleman’s Quarterly?) , and I can assure you, a very significant percentage of Ars readership is male.
Also, the amount of self-entitlement the second article displays is amazing. If you don’t like all that stuff, well, don’t visit the website. You have to weigh the benefits you get against the cost. Besides, Ars rarely (once a year, when they did the Apple ad thing) has intrusive ads. In fact, they have a whole forum post set up where they ask readers to report obnoxious ads, so they can block them in the future, or bar the provider. So the second article as a response to the Ars one is just knocking down a huge straw man.
The Ars article explicitly stated that they did not consider ad-blocking immoral. I disagree with that sentiment.
Interestingly, at NahRight the advertisements sometimes become a discussion topic in the comments.
If someone developed a firefox/chrome extension that was an “Evil Ad-Blocker” which worked by, initially, adding a small vote link next to every add. As the masses voted and a certain mass concensus was reached, only the evil ads would be blocked.
Whitelists are not only annoying to manage, but they don’t send the powerful message to advertisers an extension like this would.
Part of the problem, IMO, is that the site doesn’t have ENOUGH personal information. Not to go all “Minority Report” or anything, but if I could fill out a browser cookie that said “I’m a politically liberal 39-year-old Texan IT guy who uses Macs/Linux/Solaris, plays RPG games on my computer, lives with two cats and enjoys kayaking, microbrews and reading about medieval history– now serve ads that appeal to me!” and get ads that fit one of my interests, that would be just dandy (and, I imagine, worth a lot more to the advertising site). I don’t mind the ads for antispam appliances on the technical websites I read or for progressive political candidates on my favorite left-of-center blogs; I mind the ads for life insurance and magical diet berries and Ann Coulter books and other off-topic ads.
let me tell you why this amuses me…
i stopped going to ars a while back. and techcrunch.
and wired… oh my goodness… _especially_ wired…
and a ton of other sites, especially those of p-mags.
because i got tired of the way all the flash crap and
java script and tracking cookies bogged my browser.
frankly, the content is so lame i don’t even miss it…
i’m satisfied by one-sentence summaries on twitter.
and yeah, i now run click2flash and adblockers too,
for those sites that i still go to, and the relief means
i probably won’t have to resort to boycotting them…
but it’s too late for you, ars; you’ve been blacklisted.
-bowerbird
For a long time now Slashdot has been showing me a ticky box that stays “Disable Advertising – As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable advertising.” Which is cool and all, but I *like* the advertising on slashdot. For the most, it’s stuff I actually would be interested in…which is why I’ve never ticked it, and I guess that’s your point.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks (5)
[...] is devastating to my well-being”. Rob Sayre chimed in on the Mozilla Blog about, “Why Ad Blockers Work”. All three of these were picked up by Hacker News and became some of the most commented threads [...]
[...] Rob Sayre: Why adblockers work [...]
[...] Ad Blocking Hurts the Sites You Love” (MetaFilter) Why Ad Blockers Work (Rob Sayre’s Mozilla [...]
[...] The basic gist is very simple, as if you couldn’t tell from the article names – Ars Technica argues that viewers on their site should not be turning off adblockers; Carper calls this stance “repugnant”; and Gruber states that he doesn’t know what the easy answer is, but links to an article on Rob Sayre’s Mozilla Blog, Why Ad Blockers Work. [...]
[...] article triggered. Some of them attack to the ethics of advertising, for instance, or the low quality of the ads displayed. But I don’t pretend to embark on a moral debate here, I’m exhibiting which are the [...]