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>I kind of wish the majority of people would use ad blockers. Ads are a pretty flawed business model

Compared to what?

>There are better ways to make money

Like? Asking for charity on Kickstart or Donations?

Because surely asking people to pay for casual web content is not one of them.

Perhaps you should suggest a few? I'd love to see what you have in mind. This (monetizing online written content) isn't as trivial as you seem to imply.

Thats exactly the point, so ads are a lousy way to try and solve it. Micropayment systems like Flattr [1] could be a solution, but they lack adoption and walled gardens hinder integration. If you have a loyal community and continued updates, Flattr can be worthwhile [2] (sorry, Google translate; the important part is the graph).

1: http://flattr.com/about 2: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&...

> Look for ways to make the link between someone reading your content and someone buying something a connection, instead of merely a random, uncorrelated activity.

What do you think targeted advertising is?

> Or consider selling byproducts and content collections such as physical and ebooks (for blogs, for example).

Revenues from this sort of thing won't even cover operational costs for someone of Destructiod's size, let alone provide recurring revenue.

"Premium" services that just remove ads are generally a non-starter because...AdBlock does that for free. Subscriptions are awesome, but you have to find a way to implement a paywall where some content or value is withheld from free consumers, and that's a problem that has proved very difficult for content providers like Destructoid to solve on an internet where people expect to get their content for free.

The biggest problem with many of the "alternatives" is that they don't really work. They only really work for lone cowboys who only have themselves to feed.

1.) Recommendations don't work at scale. You are not going to find a single company to fund gaming journalism company in order to do tighter recommendations, and you aren't going to have enough man power to manage recommendations for multiple companies. Amazingly enough, there is a company called Google that provides a similar service to this, and I doubt destructoid can compete with them.

2.) Selling T-shirts is a terrible business model for a company that doesn't produce t-shirts. Again this works for the lone-cowboy, but for an actual company expecting to recuperate costs with t-shirts it would be simpler to just open a clothing line. Producing t-shirts isn't free and you once you have a sizable market its no longer easy. Now instead of hiring writers, you find yourself hiring sweatshops.

3.) Selling physical books only works for the lone cowboys (smbc, oatmeal). If you have to do it at scale, it would be smarter to just open a bookstore. And again, why should anyone buy an ebook when they could just use Readability for free?

4.) Charing for your service. This makes the most sense, NYT does it and is really successful. Problem is, it might only work for NYT. Its hard to convince gamers who in a large part don't buy their games, to pay for your service. Out of all the sites you ad-block, how many of them would you actually pay for? If Kotaku required a subscription for their service, would you actually pay for it?

Its easy to be an armchair MBA and claim ads are the problem and anything else would work without having tried it yourself, or list companies who are doing so successfully. Its just completely unfair to assume that the guys actually busting their butts trying to make it work are lazy because they use ads. If you really think these alternate models really work, you should start your company with them. With no competitors you are certain to eat the market.

Until then, please understand that online journalism, and print media in general, is really hurting to find a business model that actually works and they aren't using ads out of laziness. They are using ads to pay the bills.

2) T-shirts are a great business model, there's a reason why so many web comics do it. They provide a healthy profit margin at comparatively low overhead. For a reasonably popular site t-shirt revenue can be as much or more than advertising revenue. I'll point to Topatoco as an example here, it's a company that provides fulfillment for t-shirts and similar merch for 3rd party content creators, and is successful enough that it services several dozen such creators. Given that they manage to employ something like a dozen staff (including part-time employees) and they operate on a lower commission than many other similar services I think that's a good indicator of how successful that business model can be for the creators.

3) See #2. As for why anyone would buy a book, because a book is compiled and easier to read. Whether or not you think it's reasonable the market certainly does. 37 Signals book "Rework" is a bestseller and one of the top selling books in the entrepreneurship category. Look at the popularity of the Joel on Software books as well.

As for your final point, I disagree. Online journalism is still following the, now obsolete, model of traditional journalism. One concentrated on access, aggregation, and conduits rather than original content. Most journalism is, frankly, trash. It's regurgitation. Find one article on a news story and I can point you to hundreds of copies of the same material with no significant value added, splattered across so many "news" sites. Aggregation of that sort is no longer significantly valuable in the internet age. And sites that don't offer significant added original value are going to die. The internet is very, very good at disintermediating valueless intermediaries.

I think that the subscription model is great, and there are places where I would be willing to pay if they moved in that direction. I pay $16 a month for a NYT subscription.

One issue is that some people seem to be even more offended by the subscription model than the advertising model.

OK, I hate replying to myself, but this is a pretty significant and contentious issue, so I think it's worth it.

Here are some example of folks who I think "do it right", or at least well, relative to the standard "slap ads on and forget about it" model:

Penny Arcade (a web comic, for those who don't know). Firstly, their ads have always gone through a rigorous selection process. Most ads are for games and the site owners demand that they play the games in the ads and they only pick ads for games they actually like a lot. Thus the ads serve as recommendations more than anything, they are not just hijacking your attention they represent actual value (the effort put into reviewing the games). Additionally, PA has a line of merch which includes not only t-shirts and posters but also collections of the comic strip organized by year in physical book form. Beyond that they also run a major gaming convention (Penny Arcade Expo / PAX) and have other projects (such as PATV). This provides diversified sources of income all founded ultimately on the fan base and enthusiasm for what PA does and is about. More so, last year PA launched a successful kickstarter to remove the main banner ad from the site and, as one of the stretch goals, to kick off a major content production (the web video reality-show called "strip search"). Now, not every web comic is going to be able to do all of these things but these are good examples of how you translate "what you're good at and what you do" into money.

A similar example would be "A List Apart", a web design blog. There are very few ads on their site and those that are there are highly relevant to the readership. More importantly, ALA sells books which include material that has already been on the site as well as new material, and they run the "An Event Apart" design conference.

37 Signals falls into a similar pattern. They sell collaboration, project management, and contact management services but they also have a well regarded blog. They sometimes package up material from the blog into book form, which they sell, and they have significant contributions to major open source software projects (such as Ruby on Rails). All of these things together help further their brand and drive business to their services and books. Their blog has a small number of highly relevant ads. Indeed, they helped found an ad company which serves well-vetted highly relevant ads to a cohort of web sites that are all generally focused around web design.

Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange. They have a small number of highly relevant ads (I detect a trend). Also, if you are a regular user of the site then you won't see the main banner ad on question pages when logged in. They also monetize through jobs boards, CV services (which provide a great synergy with use of a site and help show off your expertise directly), and amazon referrals.

GitHub and Dropbox have free service tiers but also charge money for their services, and GitHub has a job board.

There are a lot of broad trends here. The best ads are those that add value rather than try to hijack the user's attention, relevant ads that have had work put in to ensure they are relevant, and ads that are not intrusive. If your site is mostly content focused then finding ways of repackaging content and selling it directly can bring in plenty of income. As can finding ways to allow your fans to express their enthusiasm and trust for your content by buying things (merch) or attending events. And leveraging whatever it is users get out of your site through additional services.

If users are going out of their way to block your ads that's a signal, it means that they find the ads are providing negative value to them. And that's often the result of allowing ads to have negative value, by simply passing them off to folks who are willing to pay money for the possibility of infringing on your readers' attentions. Otherwise known as spam. Would you change your site to one where you required readers to give an email address and then you sold all of those addresses to spammers in order to make money? That's what many sites are effectively doing by being so indiscriminate about advertising.

If you're not thinking about how your site is making money and whether that method makes sense, is sustainable, and adds value to your readership then you're not thinking about it enough. You're taking your readers for granted.

It's sad but the reality is that you need adblockers to use many websites, Google and other search engines being among the worst offenders.

The world's biggest advertiser has made the use of adblockers necessary, if you want to use their engine http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/1... or http://www.seobook.com/images/google-serp-layout.gif and not see just ads. Once activated for a site that has abused ads, others are hurt almost by default.

I really want to hear the hypothetical ways in your mind; so far you have said nothing of value; just talking bad about current way of doing things instead of suggesting a way companies selling products could reach the market without using ads.

Here is my startup idea: an ad company that also allows people to register and pay a few pennies per article in order to turn off all ads for anyone participating in the network, and for a little bit of premium / exclusive content that nobody else gets access to.

You set the price high enough that sites will want to actively switch to your network, since the premium users are worth a little more than the free users. And you require as a condition of membership that 1 article in 50 (or whatever) is premium-only content.