With all the fervor around ad-blocking what I fail to see is how do you propose those sites that you visit, read their content to make money ? Are you willing to pay every site you visit or encourage them to put up pay walls ??
It became a problem when everyone and their sister started needing to know what kinds of kinks I'm into just to sell me dish detergent.
I've been predicting for a while now that sites would fall back to the old television show model "RockAuto presents MustangForums.com" or something to that effect.
Instead, we get a dancing Albert Einstein begging us to take IQ tests.
We post about office design and our ads are primarily for office furniture or other services related to the industry. We also self-host the ads which are non-animated jpgs and sell them without using any ad networks.
What you describe works well for us :)
I'm very interested in learning more...
People seem to have forgotten that users are most likely to be interested in what they are currently reading, because it is what their mind is currently focused on.
Because our content is so specific, ads which are relevant to the content end up targeting the user because you wouldn't be spending time on the site unless you care about the content.
It definitely takes time and work to develop and maintain relationships, but we also get to keep 100% of the revenue. In some ways we've just decided that ownership of the relationship and process is more important than being able to quickly slap some Adsense code up on the site.
That said, we also used Adsense early on, but have been doing this for ~5 years.
Minimal work involved. A bunch of emails back and forth, where we tell them our ad size if they provide an image. Or they provide a logo and we manually ad the text if they aren't technical enough to provide a custom image.
We also sell the space per month as opposed to based on impressions or clicks so it makes it a little more straightforward.
A couple things:
1. It facilitates a world in which only large content providers, who can afford to individually sell ads to advertisers, to exist.
There's a lot of overhead to ad sales and individual companies do not want to work with 1,000,000 providers, they want to work with 10-100.
2. It's substantially less efficient and only works for brand advertising or mass-market direct-response advertising.
One of the greatest things that Facebook and ad retargeting enabled was the rise of direct-response brands. Previously if you were selling a niche product - and most larger brands started out with a niche product - it was very difficult to reach an early audience who would be interested in purchasing your product. Facebook and Google flipped this on it's head, enabling millions of businesses to more efficiently reach customers. Facebook alone made the direct-to-consumer brand explosion we've seen over the last 10 years possible.
I am quite content to block these sorts of adverts and I'm not worried by the site's loss of revenue. I am not responsible for their slimy choice in business model.
Let's get back to context based adverts like DuckDuckGo use. There was no need for the internet to take this path - it only did so to rapidly monetise after the dot-com bust blew their VC funded rapid growth plans out of the water.
No need, aside from the trillions of dollars of economic value it created and hundreds of thousands of previously impossible businesses it created.
The flip-side of this is that I’ve noticed that YouTube shows me PSAs from my own municipal government (“there’s an election soon” ads, “we’re building a new piece of civil infrastructure” ads, etc.) I actually kind of like that; I don’t have cable, so it’s not like I would see them anywhere else.
The entirely-static ads model does work when the consumption of the media is entwined with the consumption of the advertised brands, though. For example, a podcast can certainly advertise its own tour, since—given that you’re listening to the podcast—you likely want to see the podcaster speak in person, even if you can’t make it there.
Or, of course, if a (global) website is just advertising another (global) website. The NYT can advertise Amazon just fine.
We fully control and host our static ads and try to keep them high quality, so I've decided that minimally using IP to loosely serve a more relevant ad is okay. MaxMind offers a downloadable Geo IP database that we use to do this and are not needing a 3rd party service for this.
The upside for the user is that location and whatever the one site is able to determine about the user is all that can be shared. If the user hasn't logged in with their real name - that probably isn't much.
So instead of one ad being enough to pay for your content, you have to fill your website with banner ads, embedded ads, scroll over ads, animated ads, etc etc.
It's a slippery slope, more people use adblockers causing content creators to add more advertisements to generate the same amount of income. More people are bothered by the increase in ads, and download adblockers themselves. Rinse and repeat until ad supported content is unrealistic for all but the biggest of websites.
And I'm pretty sure even checking location is controversial. I've at least seen it included as part of tracking in the past.
That's still possible with static ads. The server can simply lookup your country from your IP address and serve the relevant ad, without tracking you at all.
I don't have cable, either, but I do have a pair of rabbit ears to keep up with local news via OTA broadcasts.
That's not my business. If they want to make money, they'll shift to other profit models that don't involve intrusive tracking and annoying advertisements.
The thing is, most articles are a distraction, a diversion. Something I do instead of the thing I should be doing and as such they are very very low value to me.
I regularly try browsing without adblocking on, and it's a constant nightmare. If sites held their advertising networks accountable to any reasonable set of standards, they wouldn't be in this situation.
The content I appreciate, I have found ways to support it.
[EDIT] to expand, I think the piles of spyvertising money funding sites & services is a big part of the decline of truly free sites and open protocols, and make running a paid site (or app, or whatever) harder since you're competing with "free" (but spying on you). Less incentive to use them, less incentive to contribute to them. The whole system's perverse and harmful and it would 100% not be the end of the world, or the end of nice things for free/cheap, if it just disappeared tomorrow.
In the world we live in something like a pihole isn't an ideological position, it's a necessity to not have everything we do end up rolling into someone else's ad profile on my household.
If I go to a site and am bombarded with pop ups, auto playing video ads, etc., then yeah why wouldn't I block them? With the malware and tracking that is often injected into ads I have no problem using my adblocker at all times and disabling it for pages that ask politely.
I'm happy to click on ads on sites that I frequent and would like to support. I think there's absolutely a balance here, and for many years the advertising industry has abused their stay.
I choose who deserves my attention carefully. Internet ads have not earned it.
giantbomb.com sells premium subscriptions and merch and does okay
It is not our responsibility to prop up their poor model. If these sites want to make their case that they won't survive without our eyes on their ads, then they can open their books for us to look at the costs and revenues and decide for ourselves whether or not we should help them. But at the end of the day, it is their problem, not ours.
I suppose for their whitelist/blacklist to work with regex matching the ads would have to be served from a similarly named domain. Like facebook.com vs ads.facebook.com, and you'd have to whitelist *facebook.com. And if they were getting ads externally you'd have to whitelist those ads for every site that you visit.