Why resistance to ad blocking is futile and what’s next for digital advertising

"Until around 6 months ago I didn’t even know about ad blocking," The author who claims to be a "content marketer" was ignorant of ad blocking until very recently. This person is out of touch, and has nothing useful to contribute on this topic.

Resistance to ad blocking isn't futile. I haven't viewed ads on the internet for years, and it's been a great ride. I guess there will be an arms race of ad blockers vs new ads or new strategies to get people to view ads. I don't care anymore, and I'm sure many are with me when I say that I will actively avoid websites who pester me or impede my consumption of media. There's an ocean full of alternatives for any given place.

It's not about money, or entitlement, or any of this, it's that displaying advertisements generally hurts your user experience, and makes your site/app/service less appealing.

Take Hulu's Paid service. In no other context would I pay money for a product that randomly stops doing what I've asked, and instead does something loud, obnoxious, and unnecessary that I don't want at all for 5-10 minutes total each hour. Although it's acceptable for a free service (as you're paying by letting your TV scream at you for a while), it's not something I'd ever pay for. So, until Hulu offers a tier, even at a different pricepoint, where their UX doesn't suck, it's just a non-starter for me (and many others).

Whining about "It's our business model" or "It's the way it's always been!" doesn't change the fact that you designed your service to suck by building it on bad advertising. You are not allowed to purposefully code a shitty UX to get paid, and then pretend your site/service/product doesn't suck because "you've gotta have ads!".

All that widespread adblocking will do is hasten the reckoning of shitty UX. You will either provide a thing where the UX is good and you still make money through some means, or you will provide a thing with bad UX, and it will die (whether because users fixed the UX with adblocking, or because users just never came back).

> This argument is based on the premise, however, that display ads are the only (or the main) way of monetizing the web while keeping the content free

Reality is that paying for content is no guarantee ads will go away. I already said this somewhere else: ad brokers will always pay for ads to be shown. Content providers will always look for ways to increase revenues. Paywalls do not change this reality.

Recent example of the above: "I paid $60 bucks to have advertisements in a game."[1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/3krj4c/i_paid_60_bu...

Why are scrapers listed as 'bad bots'? (EDIT: Maybe I don't know what a scraper is. I think of it as something like wget that I as an individual might use, but I guess it could also refer to large-scale scrapers that are grabbing content to be reproduced without attribution elsewhere.)

Adapt or become irrelevant. Whatever the next model is for publishers, they need to remember that UX will win.

- Stop tracking - Stop malverts - Stop overlays - Stop misusing visitor data

Start with a good UX and put that first.