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Comment by imh | Hacker News Reader

The argument is that traffic is down. I wonder the impact it had on revenue.

I don't see how it had an impact on revenue if ads weren't displaying, which would mean that this article is missing a key point. Not sure that each of these down-slope ranking charts are associated with an equivalent down-slope revenue chart.

Because some people don't use adblockers as a binary setting. You can choose which ads to block, for example blocking full page ads while allowing banner ads to let be. Blocking users outright is also counter productive you piss them off instead of giving them a reason to want to support you.

Not to mention is that loss of users impacts another important revenue source for many sites other than just ad networks and that is sponsored content, referrals and syndication. If I'm running a full out adblock and can't access your content I can't read sponsored content, and I can't share your content with others that might not be running adblock, or do and will be more inclined to disable it, or to even pay for that content through other means.

Boycotting rarely works, and boycotting your customers is pretty much the dumbest move any business can make.

With the site being not accessible for some part of the readers (maybe high-value, high social media impact individuals), the sites could be losing revenue because less links are created (which again would attract a lot of non-adblocker visitors).

Yes that's why I said if I can't read it I can't link it. An interesting study might be actually using platforms like HN I think "wired" is/was blocking adblcokers but might be an interesting experiment of getting like 10-20 sites and checking the amount of submissions to HN from those sites before and after they implemented their boycott policy.

I snooped around to figure out a way to bypass Wired's block (and was successful), but in the end I just don't care about their content. It has definitely fallen off the radar for me.

if a person doesnt see an ad, but has reach on facebook and shares the story, it can lead to much more ad revenue than lost on letting that one person read the story with their ad blocker enabled.

it's the same reason twitter started turning off ads for influential people.

> I don't see how it had an impact on revenue if ads weren't displaying

1. browsing hacker news sees interesting article, uses ad block.

2. posts link to Facebook

3. link gets propagated across Facebook and clicked by 1000's who do not use ad block

4. x1000's

You can think of ad block users like carriers. They show no symptoms, but could be the man vector for distribution of your content. So they may have a value that can't be measured in ad clicks.

The interesting question is if they saw a subsequent fall in ad revenue indicating a correlation between ad block users and more ad revenue.

True, that would be much more interesting. But it's unlikely that the sites are willing to share that data publicly, especially since they have already decided that the world is a hostile place.

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