Why Stack Overflow Doesn’t Care About Ad Blockers
blog.stackoverflow.com
blog.stackoverflow.com
If other sites did this, maybe ad blocking wouldn't be so prevalent.
Privacy Badger (https://www.eff.org/privacybadger) blocks a bunch of stuff on StackOverflow.
Blocks Scripts:
www.google-analytics.com
edge.quantserve.com
b.scorecardresearch.com
Blocks Cookie Only:
ajax.googleapis.com
www.gravatar.com
i.stack.imgur.com
Blocks nothing:
cdn.sstatic.net
Add content relevancy is one part of the equation, but not allowing third parties to track my actions on your site is the other, more important part of the equation (to me at least). Privacy Badger is the only adBlocker I use (besides having flash not run automatically), so I will happily view ads that don't involve tracking me.
Essentially, users who block analytics become a net negative for many sites as they add no positive value to the site operator and are just a drain on resources. There are exceptions, of course, in the case of user-generated content participation where submitting content, making comments, etc may be a draw to revenue-generating visitors. But on many sites, that user blocking ads and analytics is only hurting the site operator. If it becomes more popular - say as the default setting in an ad blocker - I'd wager we'll have some sites start to block those users at some point in the future.
For some reason, though, we don't allow that sort of privacy violation in our actual lives.
However, most real-world businesses manage to do quite well even with our rude dismissals of their desire to track us.
[edit]
Not so much. Your phone carrier tracks all your movements. Your credit car company knows every swipe. Your bank sells your information to retailers. The leasing you did on that car got you into a database of new car owners. Right after you married you started getting offers from Home Depot. And with your mortgage you started getting calls from brokers, asking if you want to put it back in the rental market...
The "real world" may not track your anonymous movements yet (NYPD cameras, anyone?), but other than that I don't see much difference. In fact it's the opposite; the non-online world is more opaque, harder to opt-out, and much more invasive, as it usually involves PII.
Another difference to consider: the motivations. In the 'real world', we used to pay for goods. In the past you'd walk to your newsstand and buy the NYT edition for $2.50 (with ads). Nowadays, people feel outraged[1] if the exact same goods aren't given away for free (as in beer), and with no trackers, no registration, no ads, no anti-ad-blockers.
Something has to give.
Today I rarely find out about anything from ads. Instead I find out from sites like HN, slashdot, etc or from social network connections and groups
Are you sure you're not being tracked? There are technologies like Prism[1] that allow stores to track people, where they go, how long they stay there, etc. On the lower-tech side, point cards[2] are also used to track purchasing habits.
[2] http://consumerist.com/2012/02/17/target-figures-out-teen-gi...
Nomi is a startup that does exactly this. They use open WiFi networks to harvest MAC addresses of cell phones and track people's locations that way.
The only way to "opt out" is to register your MAC address with them. (Aside from just disabling WiFi on your phone, of course).
Welcome to the future :(
Instead of waiting for an SSID beacon, they just broadcast their known networks and if one of them is in range, the AP will reply. It's all driven by user demand to connect to their WiFi network faster.
Also, AFIAK, this is required behaviour to join networks that don't broadcast their SSID (e.g. "hidden" networks).
I see two solutions to this problem, but neither are really tenable from a user perspective:
1) run the GPS all the time and geotag known APs[1]
2) leave the WiFi radio on all the time and passively listen for SSID broadcasts[2]
[1] doesn't work indoors, or if the location of an AP is changed (e.g. 4G hotspot). Will also have significant impact on battery runtime, and likely to be abused by ad companies
[2] will have significant impact on battery runtime
Actually, people do. Take for example supermarket loyalty cards: every purchase is logged. It compounds with online tracking too: when you then login to the online site to check your points or view offers, the information about your purchases can then be linked to web analytics and other profiled data.
We do, but apparently many even on HN don't realize it. Brick and mortar stores track customers through their phone signals (providing unique identifiers and location), cameras that can track where people go in the store and even what they look at, and more. Here are a couple of good resources where I've learned about it (though they cover much more than those issues):
Most companies that collect data use it to make money. That's not true ONLY on the web.
> For some reason, though, we don't allow that sort of privacy violation in our actual lives.
Really? Do you have any grocery store loyalty cards? Do you use a credit card? That data is shared and sold. Do you do any activities that show up on your credit report, like pay bills to a utility? That data is shared and sold. That's how the credit rating agency got it. Do you have a set-top box? It's probably selling data on what shows you watch. Do you have a cell phone? Location data.
If you actually restricted yourself to purchases which don't involve anybody who shares your data, you'd be living in a cave.
Because shops never monitor footfall in certain aisles. Of course real-world businesses do this. Plus all those people who carry loyalty cards.
Which is ridiculous, because they're about as easy to game.
Then you are losing at the negotiation table and trying to blame "the users". Those advertisers are simply wrong. No 3rd party analytics service can provide more accurate data than server logs. None.
"I'd wager we'll have some sites start to block those users at some point in the future."
And I would wager that it won't help their business increase revenue or decrease expenses.
This is very, very wrong. Parsing server logs can give you a lot of data but parsing the data directly from the client (ala Google analytics) can give you so, so much more. Data about the client itself, demographic information (beyond ip address locations) and information regarding their interests when hooked into a system that's present on many other sites.
Server logs are a great starting point but the amount of relevant data a third party service can give you is so great most are willing to make the tradeoff and use them. I'd rather have all analytics in house but that extra data can be invaluable.
In all honestly I would be fine losing some of the information that only comes from creating a dossier on a user and bringing the tracking in house it's just a lot of work and services like Google Analytics give that to you for free so it's hard to just ignore especially at a start-up.
Google Analytics provides information that goes far beyond what the server logs can tell you. The logs will give you the most accurate view of the requests to your server but that's all. You can't get insights about bounce rate, behavior, goal completion, conversion rate, etc. from server logs. To rely only on mining server logs would be a huge step backwards for a business.
[1]: http://piwik.org/docs/tracking-goals-web-analytics/
For anyone who wants to play with the demo: http://demo-log-analytics.piwik.org/index.php?module=CoreHom...
Most sites today also go far beyond basic pageviews and track all kinds of events on the page like scrolling rates, reading time, what other headlines you clicked or hovered over, etc. This is not possible without JS tracking.
Also, advertisers don't trust site owners to report what's in their server logs accurately, when there is money on the line. It would be easy to cheat.
So that's why you need an independent third party.
Say what you will about GA and privacy issues, there's a reason why it's become so common place. Not just for site owners, but advertisers as well.
For raw pageviews, sure, but try tracking a SPA with server logs, or seeing what the most common screen resolutions are, or seeing what percent of your visitors have Flash installed.
(That ignores of course that server logs are virtually useless for determining a user's behavior on a single page app. It's not the ONLY reason server logs aren't used, but perhaps is the most important reason.)
Only if those servers are personally managed by analytics experts.
The state of website statistics is a sad one.
The only time I've heard "normal folks" talk about these sorts of things, its about how creepy they are, never once about "how that great ad was exactly what they wanted". Thats assuming any awareness on their part at all.
Silent ignorance/indifference isn't consent, apporval or desire. People who pretend it is are almost certainly making self serving arguements.
"Here's a list of above-board analytics services and CDNs."
I don't want to send my StackOverflow activity to multiple different third parties. I am fine with each website operator having my traffic info for that site. I am less fine with them sharing that traffic info with third parties who can easily aggregate that information across most sites that I visit.
what's imgur doing on stackoverflow?
<img src="//i.stack.imgur.com/tKsDb.png" height="16" width="18" alt="" class="sponsor-tag-img">It's impressive to see StackOverflow putting this together in-house and I imagine it'll continue to be a competitive differentiator for companies that can pull it off going forward.
I took a class in college many years ago to meet a diversity requirement that involved reading a bunch of books about gay Latinos. I'm neither gay nor Latino, but something refreshes that connection -- every couple of years they decide to hit me up with books on the topic, including books that I bought for the class.
I don't want to completely block ads because I understand how they bring in money, but there has to be a way to interact with them a bit to make them less annoying.
Saddest bit is that I own Xero shares, so not excited that they're wasting money on ads!
My site matches office furniture ads against photo tours of office spaces - fairly is easy to see why they would work. StackOverflow attracts a specific type of person so it seems like the targeting is built-in.
I don't envy a general news site like CNN where you're trying to target specific types of people who read CNN as opposed to an industry vertical.
I'm sorry, but this really is a case of "this is why we can't have nice things." I would rather give up all premium Internet content than to have to actually manage the problem or any of the purported solutions to the problem.
YouTube would be the hardest to give up, but most of my favorite producers have Patreons and their own video-hosting sites anyway, and I might even be able to eke out a profit helping the rest move too if they needed it. I can simply curate individual "super-premium" content creators and patronize them, leaving the likes of Wired and WSJ to their fates.
I already use TheBrowser and use their micro-payment service, but I only ever put $5 on it, there just isn't that many paid articles. The content industry is extremely insistent on forcing advertising on me, sorry but no. Especially for high-volume news sites, the PITA factor far outweighs whatever insight I get from the news articles themselves.
It would be a shame if $FAVORITE were to disappear, they have great journalists, but I don't read $FAVORITE regularly, so if I never see a link for it on HN I probably won't remember it existed.
I pay for three outlets: NYT, Economist, Guardian. Nothing else in the world has seemed important enough for me to pay for it, and I won't miss them if I'm blocked.
I would never even consider subscribing to Red until YouTube promises that the fee you spend goes to the creators you actually watch.
If, and only if, Google divvied up the Red money by the creators Red subscribers actually view, then that scheme might appeal to me. As-is, it does not.
Just like traditional writers have publishing statistics, online writers use analytics to calculate how much reach their pieces have. It is sad, but writers count on pageviews, which is why you see many clickbait titles.
What does missing one specific class of employees really matter in the broader scope?
Case in point: SO incentivises for it without payment. Largely through providing an "interesting things to work on" dynamic, with rapid review and improvement of naff responses.
But answers to technical problems (many quite trivial) are a different class than, say, deep investigative reporting, or solving really hard technical problems.
On that last, there's an essay written a few years back on how the current iteration of the Internet seems to incentivise for trivial things, featured on HN. I'll see if I can't track it down.
(See what you just incentivised me to do there?)
But stepping back for a moment and looking at it from a purely financial point of view - if you're working for a company with 500 employees, how will it matter to the bottom line if a portion of them are editors instead of moderators; instead of software developers?
More broadly, the problem's nontrivial. Good true talent is rare, and even then, inspiration often uneven. It's quite possible for someone to turn out prodigious amounts of content (see Isaac Asimov, say), and even relatively high-quality content (his was good, though IMO uneven). But there are others who produce very few works -- Harper Lee, Margaret Mitchell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein all come to mind.
Incentivising technological creativity has also been quite rocky -- VC-backed startups, IPO exits, patents, state-granted charters, and patronage are among the models attempted. Many tremendously innovative individuals died broke, and the inventors of many of our most valuable creations (fire, agriculture, weaving cloth, smelting metals, writing) are entirely forgotten. Even the roster of great inventors launching the Industrial Revolution, about 200 years ago, shows few who actually prospered by that work -- several died in poverty, others were granted government awards or made money elsewhere, a small handful actually profited directly.
I've just run across Joseph Needham's absolutely stunning 27 volume History of Science and Civilisation in China, which tells the story of Chinese invention dating back literally thousands of years (don't ask for details, as I said, just discovered it, though Needham and the work's Wikipedia pages offer substantial background, and Simon Winchester has a biography of Needham giving more detail). One question I've in mind to take to it is what motivated China's inventors?
Needham himself asked what's eponymously called "the Needham Question": why didn't China, with its tremendous head start, industrialise before the West.
Other investigation / musing:
For content: a tax / universal content syndication https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...
(Phil Hunt and Richard Stallman have markedly similar proposals.)
On information, markets, and why they fit poorly: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_inf...
I can't find a post on the IR inventors offhand, which probably is a good sign I need to create one....
Nit-pick...."moderators" (the ones with the diamonds next to their names) are not employees, they're elected from the community and are unpaid volunteers (I used to be one on SO). There are staff members who have mod diamonds, but they're employed to do other things such as development, community management etc.
I'm not trying to imply that this is morally wrong. I think parent comment is just trying to say that it puts them into an entirely different class of websites than journalism. They can afford to run on less ad revenue, because the amount of content they produce per employee is much higher.
Because I do all of the editing on the site, I remember a time when I just felt hollow trying to editorialize every post title published when some just didn't need to have any particular aspect of them highlighted.
The value of a creative market segment isn't measured in the average but the by the maximum. Who cares how many crap movies there are if you're watching The Godfather tonight?
But I don't want to see ads. Of any quality level, high or low. Ever. I will never turn off my ad blocker, for any site.
I just don't want my day-to-day to be influenced by random companies trying to sell me things. Certainly, I can't avoid it: I live in a city, and walk everywhere I can, and it's impossible to avoid seeing billboards and the like. If I could wear a pair of contact lenses that would blank out real-world advertising, I would. But online ads I can avoid.
I buy things when I want to. If I feel that I have a specific want or need for something, I'll seek it out, and select the brand and model based on research pulled from the most unbiased sources that I can find. Perfect? No, of course not. But advertising is an abomination.
^^^ so much this.
there's this implied assumption that everyone using an adblocker is lost revenue, but a lot of that is going to be shitty ad impressions that never lead to clicks.
like it or not, advertisers can't actually put a gun to my head and force me to click on an ad and buy anything.
even if its a targeted ad that manages to engage me (coincidentally this did actually happen this morning with an ad from one of the rare newsletters that i've allowed to be sent to my e-mail inbox) then it probably doesn't work the way with me that advertisers want it to. i managed to find a product that i was interested in, but it was too expensive for me. so i did a "brandX vs ..." search on google to find brandY and now i've bookmarked the product their competition sells which seems to be more in line with my budget...
if you want to 'game' my purchasing habits you'd be better off not advertising at all in the classical sense, but instead send your product to review sites and/or just buy reviews in order to saturate google results. however, when all i see is obviously bought off review sites i'll go looking for relevant forums and look for user threads. by far the best thing there is to have a social media presence and have a staffer that surfs through forum sites and answers questions.
plus, you know, just have a good product for a good price to get people talking well about it... i realize that's some fucking crazytalk there though...
They want you to be standing in the soda isle of the grocery store when you are going to a party and someone asked you to pick up a drink. You don't have a strong preference. But you buy Coke because you know it. Just knowing about it is a huge advantage.
That's why a lot of advertising is priced in "per impression."
A lot of people will claim advertising has no effect on them, but that's BS. It does.
So using adblockers costs the website roughly .2 cents per ad impression.
I don't think you have some moral duty to view the ads, but they don't have some duty to give you a free website either.
Then I was buying life insurance. So I go to some lead generation website. I see a whole bunch of companies I had never heard of. Then I see Prudential. Rock. I see Metlife. Snoopy. I see ING. They sponsored the NYC Marathon that I ran in.
I didn't get Metlife, so much for Snoopy...but I didn't get a company I had never heard of either. For a few I said "never heard of them" and for others I'm sure my eye just skipped right over them.
Ads work and I bet they do work even on people who say "ads NEVER work on me." Really? When you are buying a new product, all the ad impressions you have had make absolutely NO difference? Are you sure?
Very much true. I worked in a grocery store during my school summer and even though I didn't watch TV, I could know what products were being advertised on it just by watching people's buying habits. I even did a test -- named some products to my friend that watched TV and it was spot on.
(Some) advertisers are actually smart. They do extensive, scientific research around attribution and effectiveness. Even if you don't click on ads, you're influenced by them (yes, you, too). They can track that, and it's a large part of what they're paying for. Just like TV ads.
Our belief is that if someone doesn’t like them, and they won’t click on them, any impressions served to them will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads to people who won’t click on them harms campaign performance.
and you know what, it's not the ad so much that bothers me, it's the 27 trackers added to the page by three ads in adsense and all their roundtrips and javascript lag
I wish we could bring back the days of text ads that were interesting.
I really wish ad-blockers would default to an "block annoying ads only" mode; or some kind of whitelist mode; or even some way to crowdsource so that only annoying ads get blocked.
News? Economist and NY Times. Recipes? Cooks Illustrated.
Of course the Web is still useful to buy things from a merchant; there, the site obviously has no incentive to be annoying. And sometimes for free stuff it's better to go to the site of someone who is already selling you something. You mention Bon Appetit and Epicurious. If you want free recipes, go to food manufacturer's website or to a grocery store's website. They are loaded with free recipes and there are no annoying ads...of course, the whole site is an ad. But it has what you need.
I understand if sites have a business model that needs annoying ads. I just don't visit them. It seems hypocritical to me to visit the site while not respecting its business model, especially when there are other sites out there whose business model is more aligned with your needs. I would rather support them with my money or clicks rather than visiting annoying places and then installing more software to suppress annoyances.
It selectively blocks add based on if they are tracking you, but I would imagine that most annoying adds are tracking you. You can also individually re-enable scripts/cookies on a third party domain per site basis.
This is what ABP attempted to do, and the reason why you see people advocating forks or alternative adblockers these days.
I was, and still am, quite sceptical about that claim. (At any rate, I don't know how to feel about a web developer who does not use an Ad blocker in this day and age.) It began to make more sense to me recently when the Jobs section was added to the SO front page and the new CV was introduced: Their approach now is to help developers and employers actively look up ads/CVs when they are in need of them.
This line of thinking makes me livid. They aren't losing money if they never were entitled to it in the first place. Get used to seeing my adblock, and if you or anyone else is interested in getting any money from me, then your only hope is to focus your efforts on coming up with an awesome product.
There's obviously nothing legally wrong with that contract, we're just forcing a re-evaluation of the moral rights Person A has over Person C given the above transaction.
>we permit users to downvote or close ads that they don’t like.
Before I used an ad blocker, I noticed that they had a thumbs up/thumbs down icon you could click and choose from why you didn't like the ad. I did this literally dozens to hundreds of times on the same "Azure" ad, and it never stopped showing up until I installed an ad blocker. Is that what he's referring to? If not, what does he mean?
While no users might have cared, the meta thread was pretty controversial.
Okay, so why not then make ad-blockers unnecessary by providing a "don't show ads" option?
Funny enough, we often get asked to implement the opposite: http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/273653/229741
People on SO can be reasonably expected to know how to get that button (i.e. can you google how to install AdBlock).
a) people would self-host ads or b) the target of the ad would host them (but not a third party). You could randomize ad source code and layout such that an ad blocker would have no chance removing it.
An alternative would be c) if there was much more diversity on the advertising market, and every site would serve ads from multiple competing agencies (with different formats and different URLs). This would also make it harder to block, and also make it harder for advertising agencies to create profiles (one of many reasons people block ads).
However, if Adblock becomes a default install, you will have more and more people never clicking on the ads because they never knew about them in the first place.
I hate annoying ads, but this will eventually make it impossible for small business owners to make a living through ads.
The playing field will be only big corporations, because they can handle ad blocks. The same thing has happened with the music industry over the past decade and it's just repeating in a new industry.
I feel like the new generation is pushing for more government and corporate control.
You say that like it's a bad thing. If a piece of content or a given website cannot survive without ads propping it up, was it ever worth anything in the first place? Ads are far from the only revenue-generating method available nowadays, they're just the easiest/laziest.
When online advertising-as-we-know-it finally chokes to death under a mountain of its own waste, maybe we'll see a drop in blatant linkbait lowest-common-denominator garbage that drives up the S/N ratio. There may be less content overall, but I suspect the content that survives will be much higher quality as a result.
Not that I particularly care which way things go, I run adblockers on all of my machines from a security standpoint as much as anything else.
This is Ycombinator, a site for supposed future business owners. Yes, it's a bad thing.
"If a piece of content or a given website cannot survive without ads propping it up, was it ever worth anything in the first place? Ads are far from the only revenue-generating method available nowadays, they're just the easiest/laziest."
Sure. Instead, we will now have fully integrated advertising that can't be blocked.
Would you rather see an advertisement or an entire article on a blog centered around a product? The average consumer isn't going to take a stand on things like this because they just don't care. It will only pollute the content that you actually enjoy even more.
"There may be less content overall, but I suspect the content that survives will be much higher quality as a result."
Higher quality content doesn't pay the bills alone. I don't mind because my business doesn't rely on ad revenue.
However, when I see more and more people clamoring for something like a 'basic income', I really start to shake my head...because things like this are quickly destroying many jobs.
It's not the first time the tech community has dug their own salary grave and then cried out to everyone when they can't pay the bills or they lose their house.
This is why I'm not on the other side of this: I would rather take advantage of this foolishness than be forced into it.
A site that mixes ads in content won't be popular for long (it's bad content). It's also often illegal without disclosure in many places. And once you are producing this kind of ad-injected content you already have a personal connection with an advertiser and make non-targeted advertisements!(everyone sees your same blogpost about the same shoes).
If a website can afford to do that they didn't need ad networks to begin with! They could have "magazine ads", I.e dumb images served from the source domain. Thats exactky what I'm hoping for - Internet ads being just like magazine ads.
But what if the site is the ad? For example, a lawyer's blog would have lots of blog posts about law, but the whole purpose of the blog is to advertise the expertise of the lawyer and encourage you to buy the lawyer's service. Or maybe an artist wants to showcase his portfolio of his work online, in the hopes of later securing juicy contracts or donations.
Or what if the site is simply a forum for people to "network" and self-promote themselves (i.e, LinkedIn, HN's Show Me, etc.) Those sites can indeed be popular (as people may go there to willingly consume ads), but they're all basically vehicles for advertising.
I encourage sites who feel like they need to to block adblocking users. Their demise will be that much quicker and better alternatives can rise in their place.
Forcibly removing revenue streams in the tech industry is not really going to help any future business owners.
Sure, Ad revenue isn't the only way to make money, but when you have $0 startup capital, it's many times the only way.
This only pushes out the smaller business owner and average person that wants to make some extra money and gives more power to big companies and venture capitalists.
Nobody seems to think long-term, only in their own self-interest.
The problem with advertising, on-line and off-line, is that it's user-hostile. It's manipulative and abusive even before you add trackers and malware on top of that. Maybe there was a time when advertising existed to inform people about available choices. I don't know when that age was, but it's not what's the focus of advertising nowadays. If you're acting hostile to me and my friends, I have a right to defend myself, and to instruct my friends on how they can defend themselves.
See what happens when we have these pissing matches? Everybody loses.
It's even worse for the average user because businesses have the resources to either destroy you in lawsuits or change tactics.
It worked real well for the independent artist in the 90s that could actually earn a living.
Now they are forced to go to one of the major labels or apple/spotify, which are much worse in terms of compensation.
Wasn’t the whole movement aimed at helping these sad artists that were being screwed over?
I called bullshit on this 15 years ago and predicted what has happened today.
If there wasn't a culture of rampant entitlement for free things, we would have a better landscape today.
But, I can only warn the community so much.
> Wasn’t the whole movement aimed at helping these sad artists that were being screwed over?
And who screwed this up? Not piracy, really, but labels. That and clinging to business models that don't make sense in a digital economy. The reality is not obliged to cooperate with whatever money-making idea you like - you have to find a one that works. In the digital world, content is cheap and copying is free; everyone needs to learn to deal with it. But alas, companies are more willing to destroy the Internet itself than change their practices. That's why people retaliate.
Frankly, the Internet is more important than some artists not getting properly compensated because of it (even if it's really all because piracy), and it's better to lose them than to have everything DRMed up.
The businesses started this war, and now they're complaining people are defending themselves and it gets harder to take their money? Cry me a river.
Edit: "A good proportion", not all. Probably 20%? The other 80% indeed are just against tracking/privacy/bandwidth/security, and the last 10% are fine as is.
It depends on how you do it. If your ad takes up a lot of bandwidth and processing power, to the point where by the time the article loads on my phone I can't scroll through the actual content because my CPU is busy trying to render your pretty little ad, then you've fucked me, you've fucked yourself, and you've fucked the content provider.
It's the equivalent of a local pizza chain sending someone to play a vuvuzela outside my bedroom window.
The problem is that I don't know whether ads coming in are a person politely handing out flyers, or a vuvuzela-playing jackass - and that's assuming he's not trying to literally pick-pocket me - so it's easier to just rub my magic ad-block lamp and tell the Genie to disappear everyone.
I think most people on HN would agree that ads which don't require huge amounts of scripts, show video, play audio, connect to 17 tracking networks or make up 70% of the page weight would very much be tolerable.
However you as an individual have the power to choose whether or not you consume advertising, and it's almost always a better choice not to.
And you tell us you do not care?
It's a lot of work to curate your average stream of garbage coming from AdSense etc. I really want to find a targetted ad network from a smaller company who might actually care about individual customers (if anyone knows such an ad network for {food,cooking,photography,travel,restaurants,health} let me know).
I started reading the piece thinking "Oh, another marketing guy who's drunk the 'relevant ads are good for people and everyone apart from a few contrarians really likes them' kool-aid.
So I was surprised to read what seems to be a rare example of sane thinking in an advertising person:
The truth is: we don’t care if our users use ad blockers on Stack Overflow.
More accurately: we hope that they won’t, but we understand that
some people just don’t like ads. Our belief is that if someone doesn’t
like them, and they won’t click on them, any impressions served to them
will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads to people who won’t click on
them harms campaign performance.
Isn't it a bigger waste of money, though, serving me the page that will never monetize because I will never click on the ads?
Let's assume that the only reason for the existence of the site is to make money. Then by blocking ads, I'm signaling my intent to frustrate this purpose. Shouldn't the site just not serve me any pages at all since my intent is clear?
Interestingly, the site-owner's view of the intrinsic (i.e. non-monetary) value of their site figures into this calculation, it seems.
If the site is (at one extreme) disposable click-bait with no substantial content that can't be found at a dozen similar sites, then it's a reasonable assumption that if you disable access for ad-blocking users, they'll just go and get their meaningless content elsewhere rather than enable ads. Since their ad-blocking ways are a good indicator that even if they enabled ads for whatever reason, they'd probably never click on the ads anyhow, it makes economic sense in this case to just dispense with the users.
At the other extreme, if your site is (let's say) a premier source of useful information in some sizable field, it's a good bet that if you force ad-blocking users to enable ads they will often continue to visit your site, either participating in an ad-blocking arms-race that makes it increasingly expensive for you to circumvent the blocking, or capitulating by loading the ads but just never, ever, clicking on them, costing you more money either way.
So even from a purely financial POV, the strategy of just not caring about ad-blocking looks like a win, without having to invoke the nobler-but-woolier considerations about wanting to "make the world a better place for developers."
Other ad-ops people in charge of intrinsically valuable web estate would do well to follow SO's thinking, IMO!