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Comment by paradox95 | Hacker News Reader

Since they aren't making any money from your visits to their site anyways I doubt they will be losing a lot of sleep.

That is quite the paradox, isn't it...

If they lose significant eyeballs, they can't charge a premium for the ad space. With less premium, they make less money. With less money, they can't write the articles.

At least with ad block and non-adblock eyeballs, they could say we get "XXX"k traffic per day/month/year. Less traffic overall will be bad in the long run.

I hope you did not think that the advertisers aren't capable of running a little estimation program on all those clicks going 'in' to wired that did not result in the displaying of an ad tag?

If there is any party that is aware of how many people on wired's web property are running an ad blocker it is the advertising networks.

Wired is not telling them that they get 'XXX'k traffic per time unit, they're being told what their traffic is and what percentage of them has an ad blocker installed.

I hope the advertisers realize that we have not even come close to hitting a critical mass of people that install adblockers in the first place. I am amazed by how many people don't run adblockers. I tell everyone I know to run them... Remember it is only 1 out of 5 right now... It will be much higher as the tech illiterate are taught how to install them.

The truth is, I can always just go outside. Go for a run, Go for a hike with my kids... collect some rocks, smash rocks looking for geodes, play catch, play hide and go-seek, cook, drink. All will be much better than me sitting on my computer reading articles on Wired.com

Not to mention they lose all the viral follow-on effects. If Jane never reads another article of theirs, then Jane never shares another article of theirs, and never refers a new reader or subscriber, and on goes the cascade multiplied by however many people stop reading. They end up cutting off their own oxygen.

The people commenting here that Wired doesn't need to care about ad-blocking readers, are entirely ignoring this critical element. It's a big component of how new people get introduced to Wired.

Advertisers don't care (or measure, really) non-ad-viewing users when deciding where to run these campaigns. So you're already not counted.

No, they cannot say that they have xxx users per day/month/year, the reports of the adservers are the one that are read by the advertisers (and the editors), the number of visitors is useless if you can't serve them ads.

If that's how they think they should probably take a class explaining network effects and how the ability to share a link can help spread their product.

They will however lose exposure and upvotes on places like HN, which means their overall traffic will drop and they'll lose money like that instead.

Most of the content I read comes through places like HN. If Wired loses many of the more active participants on HN (who are probably more likely to run adblockers), their articles will get posted less and upvoted less, so they'll lose many of the people who aren't running adblockers too. Would be very interesting to see how much impact those active participants have overall on their readership - my guess is it's a lot.

Actually, this can almost completely wipe out Wired from google search results.

One metric that is used to rank sites is the bounce rate. If ad blocking users simply go back to Google and look for another result, then they will get penalised by Google.

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