Attack of the Ad Blockers
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
But I'm not going to give out my credit card number to dozens of sites where I can "pay just a few dollars per month" to access their content.
I don't want an annual subscription that renews automatically, and I'm probably not going to look at another article on that site for weeks, months or maybe never, so I don't want to pay dollars for an article that they are willing to show me for a few pennies worth of ad revenue -- just let me give them the pennies directly.
Contributor works on millions of sites and on all of your browsers and devices. Some sites will show fewer ads than others, and often times, a thank you will appear instead of an ad.
If I'm paying, I don't want any ads
Basically, it works by having you bid for that ad space. If someone else outbids you, their ad shows.
I personally would rather not pay anything and get an ad, sans tracking, which worked just fine for the content providers of yore.
Does native advertising work?
It just did.
Why not have a single, income-prorated content fee which is then allocated as a quality-and-utilisation pro-rated compensation to information creators?
BBC license fee, but universal and income based, on steroids.
$100/year per person would cover all Internet advertising. $500/year per person would cover all advertising period.
(And that's for major industrialised nations only -- US, EU, Japan, Canada, Australia, roughly).
I believe this wasn't in reference to advertisers and seems rather similar to your proposal in theory. I'm unsure about the prices that will actually make sense for them to drop advertising completely though...
As if the temptation for these sites to pump out clickbait isn't bad enough as it is....
Unless you mean a completely passive option to give them a "tip" so to speak.
In which case I'm not saying it's a bad idea but how is that any different than donating once a year to NPR and PBS during their "Oh-God-Kill-Me-Now-athons." Or in the case of for-profit sites, paying for however many months of subscription fees you feel is appropriate for the value you received.
The pop-up is now blocked by my ad-blocker ;-)
"Attack of the malware blockers" would be a more accurate title.
It's really interesting where it leads us, site owners and more importantly ad networks have been lazy trying to defeat adblock.
Let the war behin I guess.
I had to update my filter lists so that it retrieves the blocklist for that feature btw.
Makes me wish you could go to HTTP and say: give me only the div's with the attribute "name" that equals "header" and "body" and all img tags with class "illustration".
Here's a nice write-up on the beginnings:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advert...
- Market for paid search of general content vs Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
- Market for paid downloading of arbitrary, user-generated video vs YouTube and Vimeo.
- Market for paid blogging vs Wordpress etc.
- Number of people paying for news vs reading ad-supported news.
- Number of new companies using LAMP or cloud stacks vs Microsoft Server stacks.
And so on. Paid markets kept getting tinier and tinier with less and less money.
That sounds like another way of saying they don't have a product that people value.
And for the record they haven't tried nearly all the models possible. This is discussed every time the subject comes up.
Lock-in is another issue. People wanted alternatives to IBM mainframes, Windows desktops, and so on. Great one's were produced. They didn't run their prior software. They didn't want to port it, even gradually. So, most of those firms folded while predecessors kept making billions.
Cost-sensitivity is a big one. They'll take something that cost them nothing of immediate value over something that cost them directly. They'll also take cheap over inexpensive. So, for instance, the companies charging 50% more for software with either zero or near-zero defects in production make very little compared to those charging 50% less. Despite a demand for higher quality stuff. For content, that companies charging for it... even under a buck an article... failed in favor of free + advertising sort of speaks for itself on user preferences.
Time/convenience is another one. This market has such a small attention span that they might ignore you within seconds of not seeing what they want. The norm is an ad on the page with content appearing quickly. With that the norm, the sites doing paid articles for new members have to somehow convince them in seconds or just a few impressions to start buying articles. Atavist giving a few away for free might be an example but they're kind of unique compared to most sites. Yet, the small player faces free, instant content vs paid, go-through-some-trouble content. And many sites usually cover similar topics. Uphill battle.
So, these are just a few issues with trying to get people to pay for things instead of use ads in a market that almost always works in favor of low-cost, low-time, and preferably-free suppliers. It's a problem with or preference of the market.
I do hope that Springer disables their firewalls, virus scanners and spam filters. Could be a boon to sci-hub once their systems are compromised and all their data leaked...
Great article, but c'mon, maybe don't offer a tautology as a survey response.
Often the artist didn't contribute to build the city in which he's performing (taxes, etc...). He is just using an already crowded street. I don't wont to be obligated to be distracted by commercial ads.
Off course, after seeing the performance I'll be happy to donate some money or to support the artist in some way.
The dishonesty of it saying that the adblocker will ("may") negatively affect the performance of the site, when it's in fact blocking an absurd number of requests unnecessary to the content people actually want to see, is astounding.
Many other sites have cdns with different domains.
As far as I can tell, it fires incorrectly when the page is loading slow for whatever reason (and presumably some external JavaScript doesn't get loaded fast enough to disable it).
This means: no external services to track the f..k out of your users, and you yourself provide a platform for bidders to upload banner images or plaintext ads (Google Adsense-like) to.
Benefits, aside from making it harder for people to ad-block:
1) you don't hand over a sizable chunk of your ad income to middlemen with incentives for fraud (they charge the advertiser, but claim fraud towards you and keep the change)
2) you can be (relatively) sure that your site doesn't get a nasty Google penalty for serving malware.
Is there any (F)OSS/SaaS platform available for an individual to provide such a platform for bidders?
edit: I forgot offering paid content and referral links (Amazon!), these can be worth quite a chunk of money if your site is popular enough.
I give the ad industry, especially the fraudsters, not much longer than two years, given the rising trend of adblockers.
Native ads are the only way that's left, and turns out that the big media houses usually already have an ad acquisition and disposition department for print ads.