One wonders (he said) whether Forbes might want to pursue success by publishing irresistable articles -- not by seeking new ways to attach ticks to passers-by.
Interestingly, we sort of know what this conflict is: it's yellow journalists vs muckrackers.
* There are, in the body politic, economic and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man whether politician or business man, every evil practice, whether in politics, in business, or in social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful.*
— Theodore Roosevelt
The dying business model is easily-detectable, obvious ads that can get defeated by NoScript or a regular expression.
There are a million benefits from high traffic, even if that traffic doesn't click ads. I'm not going to list them, they are dead obvious.
It's going to be difficult to have any interesting discussion, then, because it's not at all obvious to me what benefits high traffic has for a typical commercial site if that traffic isn't generating revenue or providing something else of value.
Obviously if the purpose of your site isn't to make money then things are different, but given that we're explicitly talking about models for revenue generation here, I think it's reasonable to assume commercial websites that are intended to be profit-making.
So I think its easier to take existing traffic and profit off of it by selling it (ads) or selling to it. Those are easier options than first getting the traffic, then taking those steps.
That may be true, but if we assume for the sake of discussion that ad blockers are effective and visitors using them won't generate revenue that way, that only leaves selling to those people in one way or another.
If you're running some sort of e-commerce site, that's fine, though I'm guessing we're talking about quite different kinds of commercial site in this case. There probably aren't a lot of e-commerce sites that also use major ad networks in conjunction with their content marketing as a significant source of revenue.
Likewise if you have some sort of referral scheme available, you can essentially replace ads with some form of product placement that is less likely to be blocked and let someone else do the actual selling.
But what about purely informational sites, or something like a review site that wants to be seen to be impartial and therefore doesn't want to use direct affiliate marketing links for products under review?
Its then easier to convert existing semi-related (blog) traffic into purchasers then it would be to get all new traffic.
My original point was that driving traffic that doesn't generate revenue one way or another is actively bad for a commercial site.
If they were smart they'd realize that long term their monetization method is going to change, and the value of someone as a lifetime reader is worth more than the lost revenue of a couple years of adblocking.
There is something to be said about adblockers still seeing native ads, but thats unfortunately the route we are heading down.
HN wasn't even a thing. but every slashdot article pointing to it, I ignored and looked over the comments if anybody pasted the behind login/paywall text.