So this is an old article, on an old topic, but I was curious what hubski thought of the idea. Do you use Adblock or noscript or turn off Flash, or other anti-advertising measures? Do you leave it on regardless of what site you're on? I found this article preachy and not reflective of an actual debate over the idea, and while I do approve of getting content creators the means they need to keep creating, I'm still not sold on doing that just through advertising.
On a related note, would you still adblock if it didn't take away ad revenue? Say if Adblock removed the visual appearance of ads but still added to the site's hits? Is that any more honest or fair? There's no such thing as a free lunch, after all; aren't you just robbing the advertisers blind in that case? What role does advertisement play in a world where most people don't like ads, and would choose to get rid of them, and are now capable of doing so easily?
The Internet is changing, drastically. The old banner ad model is dead. Planet Money recently did a story about how Andrew Sullivan is creating a paywall around his blog (or well media empire), which seems indicative of this. The internet will no longer be free, and I'm sort of okay with this, sort of saddened as well, cause I like the free Internet. I also believe that content creators need to be able to make content though, which means they need to be paid.
Yeah, throughout the internet things are often moving to different means of monetization. I'm curious how it works out. My thing is that for anything beyond a few bucks for a decently long membership, I don't know that I'd pay for it. But then again, while everything out there is free its easy to say that. Perhaps when every news source goes for a pay-to-play model though, I won't have that kind of choice. I don't believe advertising will still be profitable, and this NPR story really does point out that the advertising model simply isn't as lucrative as subscription fees, at least at the level of the NY Times. Not to mention that these days, even not-too-tech-savvy people have access to a fully-featured and easy to use adblocker in most mainstream browsers. And perhaps a pay model will be better by not having to base "Success" around pageviews. It might improve the quality of the work. Still, I'm not fond of having to pay for good content, because I still get good content for free right now. Who knows what kinds of cool new ways creators will be able to sustain themselves in the future though?
I have been thinking about the future since I listened to that Planet Money podcast. If I was a middling level blogger, I would try to get a few other bloggers to join in a "federation" of sorts, where viewers can subscribe and then the profit is shared among the bloggers. This seems like a way to attract a lot of viewers and offer a wide range of content for price. It would be easier for me, as a reader, to pay if I knew I was getting access to a large range of blogs opposed to just a single blog.
I don't understand why people have such a deep seated hatred for advertisements. I don't actually find them terribly obtrusive unless they make noise or are a pop-up window, and a website is still a business that needs to make money to run. They aren't doing you a favor by making content you enjoy, they are running a business and advertising is a way to avoid charging their audience for the product. Right now there are three major solutions to the problem of getting money for a website and none of them are very good. You are really down to either running through donations, running through advertisements, or setting up a paywall. Of course you can combine these in various degrees, but really that's it. With a paywall, what happens is people pirate your content. One person gets an account, distributes the information to as many other people as click on the link. Even if its just sharing with friends, that's 5 sources of revenue gone right off the bat. Is piracy of articles as common as it is for movies, music, and video games? Of course not. Still there though, and even if its only a small percentage of your userbase, that adds up over time. Donations are inconsistent and they aren't really sustainable as a business model. So yes, for relatively small sites like Hubski or for individual bloggers like Spoony, donations work. I'm fairly certain mk is not drawing a terribly large profit from here, but he can correct me on that if I'm wrong. So what's left? Well, advertising in some form. Why? Because its really not that obtrusive and it does help curb pirated content while giving revenue to the creators. Why try and steal something that only costs maybe 30 seconds of your time to experience, or less if its a banner ad? There really isn't any. I really hate the term entitlement, but for the most part that's what I see. Its a way to get content to creators without taking a dime out of the audience's pocket, and yet people have developed a way to utterly and totally destroy a model that is doing very little harm to them and their wallets. Can you imagine a world where everything is behind a paywall of some kind? How many individual subscriptions you'd need to keep up, in addition to paying for the internet itself? That's my idea of hell on the web. Having to mange 10+ subscriptions just to view the content that I do today is not my idea of a good time.
There are 2 ways to make a memorable ad. The first way is to create a beautiful, funny or otherwise great ad which is a good experience in its own. The second way is to make the ad as annoying as possible (in the spirit of bad attention is attention as well). Unfortunately the second category is abundant on TV and radio because it is cheaper to create that kind of ad. (I remember one telling me to turn off my radio. When I didn't it proceeded to tell me "see, radio advertising works". Really annoying. I made a point out of it to turn off the radio every time I heard that one). Now, I don't blame people for blocking ads on the internet any more than for zapping away because of radio/TV commercials. There are a couple of problems with internet ads for the one showing the ads however. First, the one who placed the ad can see how many people have actually seen it while on TV, radio and in the streets they can only guess. Second, when using the internet, you send your content to someone else. The receiver can then decide what he wants to view and what not. There is no way you can control what the receiver sees. These problems make the internet different from the more traditional media. So, the internet is different. It can count the number of views and everybody can block what they want. Imagine TV with an unlimited skip ad button and the ability to count how many ads are actually watched. My guess is that the stations will be broke soon because no one watches the ads anymore. This is what is happening on the internet at the moment. More and more people find the unlimited skip button in the form of ad blocking software. And once they have found that button, they set it to autoskip and will never ever think about it again. You have lost them forever as potential 'eyeballs'. Now, how do you prevent people from setting up blocking software? Simple, don't run ads at all and make money otherwise. But is you really want to run them, your only option is to use acceptable ads. That isn't the case at the moment. Youtube treats its player as a tv, putting 30 seconds long ads in front of a 3 minute video and news sites treat you like an idiot with intrusive ads about completely unrelated things while often cutting an article in 3 parts to generate more ad revenue. This doesn't amount to acceptable advertising in my book and gets blocked accordingly. So, I think we have arrived at my conclusion about advertising. Not all advertising is bad, but it needs to be acceptable. Unacceptable advertising will be blocked and once I block, there is no way back. You screwed it up and I don't have the incentive to give you a second chance. Now, for the other possible ways to make money: Paywall and donations. Paywalls suffer from piracy, just like everything else. However, I think it is really naive to think that you can ban piracy. Most independent studies published on the subject have even shown an increase in sales for pirated stuff (unfortunately I cannot find those studies anymore, sorry). The problem with paywalls is that there is no easy way to pay. For example, I I want to pay for a paywall, I have to use a credit card. I for one, don't have one since we have a better system to pay online in the Netherlands (and we have to pay for a credit card). However, since the paywall is in the US, I cannot pay unless I use PayPal. If I don't have PayPal either it becomes pretty hard to pay (and I WILL be taking the easy route, so no doing a long setup procedure to get a PayPal account etc). Long story short: Make things easier and have something to offer. Then people will pay. On donations: Yes, you are right. Donations are not a viable business model for a for profit organisation. For non-profits and small blogs/sites this is actually viable.
Know your customers. In this instance, according to the article, 40% of visitors run ad blocking software. Therefore, why run a business model which is reliant on advertising revenue. Know what your customers are willing to pay for. Maybe it's adverts, maybe it's subscriptions, maybe it's donations. Maybe your content isn't good enough to convince people to pay for it.
Most of the more "hip" websites I use (Wikipedia, music trackers, occasionally webcomics, the smarter blogs and startups) have abandoned banner ads in favor of periodically relying on their users to donate or pay for extra features. Much better business model. It's important to remember that business models with regard to the internet are still in the early trial-and-error stage. It took the automobile industry a while to get it right, etc. There's a natural evolution to these sorts of things.
Wikipedia is a poor example, considering that it takes months of annoying banner ads begging for donations before they are able to make their fundraising target. They would undoubtedly have an easier time getting funds if they ran an advertisement or two on each page.
Wikipedia is a perfect example, because they refuse to sell out and possibly sacrifice the validity of their content for easier money. Best business model choice they could have made. Now that is Web 2.0 if I ever saw it. Their system works perfectly, and anyone who is annoyed by that banner has some problems.
I don't use an ad blocker but I also don't click on ads. Perhaps the advertisers feel they are still passively able to get there brand to impress upon me, just by my seeing the ad? Maybe there is some truth in that, but I still think the value of most online advertising is mega-inflated. If a large contingent of your user base is using ad blocker, then you may have to reconsider your revenue model. Ultimately, your users shouldn't have to modify their behaviors to appease your business plan. -it works the other way around. When businesses forget this, bad things happen.
Personally, I don't like ads. I don't run ad-blocker, but I do tend to avoid sites with disruptive ads. Ad based-revenue splits the service into two, and creates a three-party relationship where the service tries to make it feel like a two-party one. If we have ads here, I don't mind if someone uses ad-blocker. That decision is the user's and it is not something that I want control over. If ad blocking means our model is not sustainable, then it is on us to adapt.
I don't mind advertisements one bit. What I do mind are security risks on my machine. As a result I don't have flash on my machine except by default through Chrome browser which I run only when Safari can't display said content). If I were running a website that relied on advertising, I'd probably just have a 'donate' button and where the ads would have been displayed were the user not using Adblock, I'd default to a considerate call to action asking them if they'd care to donate to make up for the ad revenue we're missing out. I think most people are pretty reasonable. They aren't cheap, they just don't want to a) be annoyed, b) get spammy virus shit ju-ju on their box. I've seen what banner ads and pop ups can do to a machine. They are probably the number one way security is compromised for the average user, so the steps I take to prevent this take down an overwhelming majority of benign adds in the process.
I leave AdBlock on all the time. After reading this, though, I might turn it off for domains that I enjoy frequently. However, there aren't that many. I get linked to news through crowd-sourced aggregators like Reddit and Hubski rather than by directly visiting hosting sites. Additionally, I'm trying to stop using the internet purposelessly in general. I don't think there's much on the internet that I would be willing to pay for right now.
I block ads for good reasons (even if I say so myself). It is because I really hate tracking and allowing ads shows that I somehow agree with the big guys that they are allowed to track me. Also, I loathe the banner/flash type of ad (instant leave and no return if you run one of those on your site and I happen to catch you). I don't mind unobtrusive, unpersonalized and clearly marked text ads since those are, well, unobtrusive and easily ignored without using technology. If you need to use trickery and flashiness to sell your product you are clearly doing it wrong. I recently read the first page of mnmlist.com. It talks about a minimalist website, the how and why. He argues that you also need to care for the reader. The reader also hopes to gain something from being at your site. The most amazing part is that even though all his work is in the public domain and there are no ads on his sites, he still manages to make a living off of his sites. Clearly, there is another way. Things like flattr are a step in the right direction to make money making on the internet easier. It allows people to give to creators without having to deal with the annoyance that is advertising. Even large sites like news sites could use something like this. Maybe it is really flattr like, or maybe it is a paywall where you need to pay a few cents to read the complete article. A bit like buying music via iTunes of a similar store.
I'm in the desktop Linux contingent. Flash support on Linux (especially 64 bit) has always been extremely buggy and I will see massive CPU spikes whenever I have to view flash content. I also have no patience for sites that kick off sound or video automatically. So I can't functionally surf without an ad-blocker. With that said, if I know the site doesn't use flash ads and if they don't start sound, I'll try to whitelist the domain for ads so I can support the site.