Don't Blame Your Community: Ad Blocking Is Not Killing Any Sites
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You'll note that adsense is specifically blocked by that list. The list also catches The Deck ads. Both of these ad types are things we hear people say "we won't block ads if you run them like this"... but they block them anyway.
The title is right, though, Ad blocking isn't killing any sites. We didn't really say it was either. This whole exercise is really the result of not being able to rehire people who were laid off last year specifically because our ad inventory is being hammered by ad blockers.
Did I miss something or did Ken specifically say: "Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love" That seems to be the same thing, no?
And when you say "the result of not being able to rehire people who were laid off last year specifically because our ad inventory is being hammered by ad blockers."
You're still missing the point. You're blaming your readers who chose to use adblock rather than focusing on ways to build a better business model.
Come on, you guys know this. You've covered the RIAA/MPAA doing the same exact thing over and over again. Don't blame your users and the choices they make. Focus on providing more value.
The difference between us and the RIAA/MPAA is that we're not justifying our lobbying efforts to reform copyright control. We're simply experimenting with technical means of keeping content bundled with ads and social means of educating users who might actually give a shit. The moment one of us goes to congress and says you need to legislate our ability to serve ads alongside our content is the moment you come gripe to me, and we laugh together because I've already quit my job.
And, come on, don't put up strawmen. Just because you're not lobbying to change the laws doesn't change the comparison which was apt: rather than admitting you need to fix your business model, you blamed your users for the choices they made. It's obnoxious, and you guys -- of all the sites out there -- should know that better than anyone.
[citation needed]
Not really a fair comparison. The problem with the RIAA is not that they want people to pay for what they consume, it's that they make the experience for legitimate users worse than for pirates. What Ars did makes the 'pirates' experience worse, without substantially inconveniencing 'paying' users.
Why Google keeps your data forever, tracks you with ads
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/03/google-keeps...
When I get to the point of site launch, my plan is to please the visitors - not the advertisers. The advertisers with a brain should find the former goal valuable, too. Or rather, let me say, I'd like to derive my income from advertisers who share my user-experience priorities.
Am I doomed? Well, I'm sure going to give it my best shot to offer quality over commercial glitter/abuse.
What you'll find is that ad agencies build one ad for, say, 500 sites based on a common set of guidelines (which are often less strict than ours). If you believe your site users would be happier not seeing that particular ad, your choice is to not run it.
I would love to run nothing but text ads, but the minimum we can run to pay our writers is basically "flash in standard spots with occasional premium campaigns".
Why are you trying to monetize your audience through ads if they aren't interested? If you could disable all those ad blockers do you believe that same ad inventory would be of any value to an advertiser? Maybe in the very short-term it would, but in the long run it won't provide any measurable value to an advertiser.
You should move away from an ad supported model and focus on sponsored content, buying guides, case studies, etc. There are much better ways to monetize tech-centric content.
We run buying guides quite somewhat regularly. Our audience doesn't want more buying guides, though. They basically want what we already write.
I feel for the guys who were laid off. That sucks. Life is tough. But this is not the only way to make money. I block advertising because it annoys me. I pretty much stopped buying music and deleted all the non-free mp3s on my hard disk because of the attitude of the music corps to their users.
But I give money to sites that provide value and more importantly build a relationship. That's what Techdirt understands and almost certainly has got them some donations today from people like me who appreciate reading articles by someone who can express what I'm thinking better than I can myself.
p.s. look in the linked article's comments and you'll see this (not from me incidentally):
"My comment asked Ars why there's no donation button. I've yet to receive a reply. I will not turn off my adblocking option for any site ever again. If these sites truly are dependent on ad revenues to survive, it's not my problem." - have you guys tried a donate button, and if so how were your results? I'm not a regular reader but it's a pretty big jump from reading a few articles to subscribing for 6 months.
You may be shocked to hear this, but most of our readers responded really well to Ken's post the other day. We had about 50x as many new subscribers since Friday as we've ever had over an equivalent amount of time. We also saw a noticeable increase in our ad views/pageviews ratio.
It's good that you donated to TechDirt, I love seeing people throw some money towards sites they love. We've run donation systems in the past and they haven't really been worth maintaining, but I'm sure we'll consider running them again. Selling services for a fixed price seems to work quite a bit better, even if those services are "see our site ad free, minus the guilt".
Actually I'm not too surprised that people turned off their adblockers when you asked them. That's what I'm saying - engage with people and if you get on their wavelength they'll respond positively.
I wasn't sure how you'd take my comment, but I'm encouraged by your response. Some comments by Ars in the original DOI thread were offensive ("f*ing Wladimir Palant"), your reply restores my faith.
When I surf the internet, most sites I visit I don't build up a particular relationship with. I'll just read an article here or there. I won't read through all the terms and conditions or turn off adblockers for every site I visit, life's too short. But if it turns out Ars provides a useful service in the future, I just might if you guys ask nicely like this. I still question the sustainability of this strategy, but then again I don't run a successful web site, so who am I to say.
Thanks again for the positive response, and good luck.
Adblock is like Napster. People want content; the vast majority of publishers only have one business model; a lot of consumers decide to take the content without bearing the cost imposed by that model.
Some people won't pay no matter what - music filesharing is still around, of course. But a lot of people did start buying music again when Amazon and Apple and eMusic changed the price structure to something they were willing to pay.
There are a few sites like Ars and LiveJournal and MetaFilter that have ad-free options for paid users. Maybe this is a small niche and will never be big business. But maybe there's some way to get more people to pay directly in exchange for ad-free content.
Yes, by either:
1) charging for content 2) making each article an advertisement for something they are trying to sell 3) selling their own products, which will still involve some sort of advertising
It seems like the people fighting against the advertisers are against all forms of commercialism. Even non-flashing pure text advertisements like Google Adsense are blocked by default in all of the adblockers. If it really was only about annoying and flashing ads, why is this the case?
"Adblock is like Napster. People want content; the vast majority of publishers only have one business model; a lot of consumers decide to take the content without bearing the cost imposed by that model."
What an elegant way to put the reality of the situation: Some users feel they are entitled to free content. It's an emerging trend that is starting to happen in many industries (music, movies, books, software, and advertising).
If I, as a content provider know many people are using an adblocker, I will try to find a way around it (or start charging for content). If people stop going to my site because of bad advertisements, I will make any effort to remove the offending ads.
It reminds me of passive-aggressive children. They are pissed at a site/company and instead of telling them about it, they just decide to block ads and go there anyway. If the movement was really trying to make the Internet a better place (with better ads), they would actually be making an honest attempt at notifying the offending site.
"Some people won't pay no matter what - music filesharing is still around, of course. But a lot of people did start buying music again when Amazon and Apple and eMusic changed the price structure to something they were willing to pay."
We aren't talking about paying money. The only thing people have to do is view a simple advertisement. It takes almost no effort.
This is precisely why I use an ad-blocker. I don't really mind animated gifs - I've learned to tune those out. But ads - flash ads are the usual guilty party - that actually fuck with the content actively piss me off, and they are why I have both adblock and flashblock.
Advertisers are increasingly demanding about those, though, which is one of the reasons we worked so hard to make "no ads" a feature of our subscriptions.
This would also separate out the people who are legitimately concerned about malware and excessively intrusive ads from those (sadly, I suspect, the majority) who simply don't want to pay for others' work.
In a broader sense, it's very questionable to say "Gee, content sites should be profitable!" and cheerfully avoid explaining just how, especially right after you've finished explaining how every known method of monetizing content just won't work.
Clearly, companies find putting ads on your site worthwhile, even if they're less creative by doing so. You, in turn, find taking their money worthwhile enough show us those ads.
Which approach brings in more money? Is the truth ultimately that conventional site ads still tend to work?
And, yes, we do have conventional ads on the site -- and I'm guessing you're not a regular Techdirt reader (which is totally cool, by the way), but we've discussed this. Having conventional ads is a way to get companies to talk to us about the other offerings that we do. They basically act as lead generation for us because so many companies only think traditionally, they contact us about advertising, and we try to steer them towards other, smarter, programs. But we still let ads go through, even if we tell them that they won't be particularly effective. If people still want to give us money for no good reason, that's their mistake. But we are careful not to take intrusive ads.
And, our ad revenue is less than 15% of the site's revenue (during Q4 it goes higher). So, no, the conventional ads are a waste, and I expect them to die out over time. But, for now, they're a great way to get companies to pay us to become leads for more creative solutions.
Admittedly, that's a slightly different issue.
Millions of people who don't care one bit about sports watch the SuperBowl for the ads.
Users fundamentally don't want annoying, content-blocking, misleading, irrelevant, privacy-compromising, browser-slowing ads. A couple of internet ad companies that have gotten away from this model are The Deck (http://decknetwork.net/) and Project Wonderful (http://www.projectwonderful.com/).
Millions? Really? I don't think so.
If anything, they can pull up the ads on Hulu or YouTube if they really weren't otherwise interested in the game.
106.5 million people in the US viewed the last Superbowl. According to Nielsen (http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/consumer/survey-most-sup...) 51% enjoy the commercials more than the game. Of the ~54 million viewers who enjoy the commercials more than the game, how many have no interest in the game at all? I'd wager it's a number rightly measured in "millions".
Going back to the original point: the claim was made that people don't want to see ads. Yet ~54 million U.S. Superbowl viewers wanted to see the ads more than the game. The problem isn't with "ads" per se, but with the way advertising is conducted on the internet (which is the point the original article made.)
That's an awful lot to sit through with no interest; not buying it.
"The problem isn't with "ads" per se, but with the way advertising is conducted on the internet (which is the point the original article made.)"
And would the phenomenon of Superbowl commercials even exist if people didn't have to sit through commercials in live TV? The answer is obviously not. You're talking about a side-effect of a technological limitation. If commercials aired on a side-channel that could be blocked without losing the show, we'd never have seen the development of high-priced, hyped Superbowl commercials.
These media are fundamentally different.
"would the phenomenon of Superbowl commercials even exist"
Unlikely. But the fact that the phenomenon does exist demonstrates that people ARE interested in advertising under certain circumstances.
The internet is fundamentally different, but people are fundamentally the same. The problem here is not "people hate ads", it's "people hate ads of the sort that are common on the internet, they hate them enough to seek technological solutions to block them, and the technological solutions are often applied in such a way as to block all ads indiscriminately."
The problem isn't with "advertising" as a whole. It's with advertising as it's currently done on the internet.
I think it demonstrates that people are desperate for a common experience (usually to make small-talk about.)
Superbowl ads are convenient since it is a safe subject to bring up for both people who watched the game as well as those who do not care or or do not understand the game. This is also why we have celebrities.
But I think one of the main points is, be smart and use restraint when necessary. If a publisher comes to you and says "Hey, we have a new ad unit that takes over the page!" the advertiser should know that it's a bad idea and use restraint instead of buying up any new ad unit that's presented to them.
If you look at mobile advertising, the click-through rates are 10 times better than online. Why? Mainly because there is less screen, so there is less ad clutter. So it's an approach that works.
But basically, publishers and advertisers are lazy and instead of looking at data and figuring out creative ways to grow, they just spend more money to try to increase return.
It works ok for entertainment, but do you really want to read an article like "Why you shouldn't move your sites to the cloud, brought to you by IBM"?
Well, it saddens me that people running adblockers will force many sites to do this to survive.
It'd be good if we stopped pretending everyone runs adblock. 99.5%+ of people have no issue with ads, and actually find them useful.
That 0.5% who run adblock etc, really aren't worth worrying about much.
That 0.5% who run adblock etc, really aren't worth worrying about much."
Adblock plus on mozilla.org gets around 1,000,000 downloads per week. It may not be a huge percentage now, but if it continues at this rate, it will be.
I have a site with (in february) 37663 pageviews reported by google adsense, but 49581 pageviews reported by google analytics. If the mismatch there is from adblockers, then I must be an outlier. I hope it is that google didnt have ads to match and displayed some public information message instead.
I'm not bitter or anything though. I block ads myself, mostly because I'm too afraid of accidentally clicking ads on a site of my own, and the punishment that can lead to.
Then again, it also probably has a larger percentage of people that wouldn't pay any attention to the ads even if they were visible. From Ars' point of view it would be great if these people shut of their ad blockers, but the advertisers would probably be getting the short end of the stick, in that case, which would (over the long term) drive advertising prices down, etc. Ars would pick up some profits in the meantime, but solely at the expense of the advertisers, who are now getting screwed by paying for eyeballs that are worth less on average than the ones when people weren't shutting their ad blockers down. I'd certainly pay less for per-impression ads on a site that wouldn't show content to people with an ad blocker, for this very reason.
It's a grand circle of life, and frankly, it's hard to say what second order effects any of these actions might have. It very well may be that the presence of ad blockers raises the average value of the eyeballs that do see the ads enough that advertising prices end up higher and Ars does better overall. It's equally possible that they're correct, the ad market hasn't adjusted to the presence of ad blockers yet, and they're still getting paid too little per-eyeball. I'm not sure. Neither are they.
But in theory, at least, over the long term, if people with ad blockers really aren't paying any attention to ads anyways, the market should correct for this and the results for both advertisers and the sites providing ad space should approach the true value.
My gut feeling is that people who block ads globally but see them on Ars would actually notice/respond to them better than people who are just generally banner blind. If the majority of the people who've emailed us are to be believed, they don't see anything else on the page except ads when they have ads enabled. I bet advertisers would kill for that. ;)
The biggest problem is that there's no chance someone blocking ads is going to see an ad, and there's a real (but maybe tiny) chance that same person would respond to an ad. There's an even better chance that they'd respond to a really nice campaign that "spoke" to them.
Please do. I certainly wasn't pretending that in the first place.
Tech journalism aside it's perfectly possible to make ads that rise above the perpetual noise of CONSUME! advertising we all live with. Look at things like Honda's "Cog" or Old Spice's "I'm on a horse".
If there's a better example of why many people block ads than [1] I don't know what it is.
I don't even bother to block ads anymore. I see a double-underlined word, a popup or a 90%-noise blogspam page and I just hit back. There's so much content out there that doesn't abuse your attention why bother with the noise?
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/akj4z/get_your_mcdigg_...
On the other hand, the grating "Head On" ads spurred a lot of sales.
If you are simply interested in generating revenue from any corporate sponsor, the question becomes a little bit more open ended.
I think that is what he is pointing out with his specific examples about UPS, Intel, and Sun. Not only were the companies sponsoring content, they were sponsoring a specific project that interested all parties involved (and disclosing that).
The interesting subtext of this discussion is that as users we really hate the sketchy tactics put forth by ad-networks, and that as content providers, ad-networks are the 'easy' solution (easier than doing real legwork to get actual corporate sponsors).
While the effectiveness of display advertising is not as high as other channels (email for instance) it is still effective. The "american idol" demographic clicks on lots of ads.
They did at least suggest that a monthly subscription might be forthcoming, so something good might come out of it in the end.
When an ad ends up on the site that violates our guidelines, we get it removed very quickly. It's an unfortunate fact that the ad ops people will occasionally put an ad meant for GQ on Ars, so you'll end up with something that expands by itself, does a popup, etc. They're never malicious, but oftentimes violate the Ars guidelines.
Part of our "solution" to this problem is better educating users about the economics of ads, the effect their ad blockers have on us, etc. It seems to be working based on a small 4 day sample.
I was sharpening the point a little: from what I understand, Ars does indeed have reasonably well-behaving ads when it comes to essentially the aesthetic side. The underlying privacy, security and psy-op/propaganda problems remain, though, and the sense I got from staff comments was that those were simply the Unchangeable Facts of Advertising and nothing could be done about it. These are by no means easy problems to solve, but I think projecting understanding those concerns and figuring out viable alternatives ("having a conversation" about it with the userbase, if you will) can go a long way.
> Part of our "solution" to this problem is better educating users about the economics of ads, the effect their ad blockers have on us, etc. It seems to be working based on a small 4 day sample.
I have no doubt! I think a big banner would have been a better way to do it to begin with, but the subsequent article addressed that part adequately.
I will subscribe once the short-term version comes out.
Advertising models work. But your advertising model might not.
Or, they may push savvy and not-so-savvy media companies into serving up advertising content that's more difficult to block. Like ad content embedded directly in the content.
It's an arms race, and the escalation isn't going to be pretty.
AdBlock on my browser does absolutely nothing to reduce the amount of money that websites I visit can earn from my.
Yes it does. Not all ads are pay-per-click.