brainwidth

Ken Fisher of Ars Technica on How Ad Blockers Hurt Revenue

jamiek:

From Gruber: “I have no easy answer, but I will point out that there’s no inherent reason why ads have to be something people are tempted to block. It’s not enough to ask readers not to block ads — you’ve got to work hard at providing ads that readers actually enjoy, or at least aren’t tempted to block.”

If publishers realized that and stopped the “Punch the Monkey/Bin Laden/political figure” then maybe they’d see revenue go up.

This is such an interesting problem. I use an ad-blocker and have for a very long time. It makes my internet experience a lot quieter, and it bugs me when I have to use a browser without one. I spend quite a bit of time on Slate, and when you have to visit that page without an ad blocker, man is it obnoxious.

That said, the ad blocker does it’s magic on every site I visit, so any ads that are caught by the filter subscriptions I have are just invisible to me. I don’t ever think “well, I should look at the ads on this site just to see if they’re not the same as every other site serving doubleclick (etc.) ads”. I treat any ads that are caught by blocker as equivalent to shoot the monkey or teeth whitening ads.

I don’t think that’s fair, but at the same time I don’t think that subjecting me to 75 ads per page is particularly fair, either.

Gruber also linked to Rob Sayer at Mozilla talking about why people use and like ad blockers. In the article he suggests that more careful attention to the ads being served (i.e., fitting the ads with your content rather than using a syndicate like Doubleclick or Federated Media which just throws ads out there). But the problem there is a logistical one. How do individual sites negotiate for ads, how do they assure themselves they get the best rate possible, how do they even get in contact with people to convince them to place ads?

Are ad networks like The Deck the answer (looking at kottke.org I see that deck ads are not blocked by my filters, which is something)? And how does that type of system square with larger sites that currently serve many more (and more intrusive) ads?