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"Half of our users block ads. Now what?"

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Tinman57:
  The ad marketers screwed themselves by assaulting our privacy with their tracking.  And then there are websites that takes 5 minutes to load up with nothing but ads and one small article.  Then there are the pop-ups that get in your way, sometimes popping up on cue every X minutes.  Then let's not forget the scrolling ads they injected into your status bar, basically making it useless other than a constant ad continuously scrolling.
  Oh, I could go on and on, but we've all seen it, and most of us are tired of it.  They made their beds, now they can lay in them.....

mouser:
My natural alliance is with the small website trying to survive on the revenue generated by ads.

BUT, I have a couple of thoughts about this:

1. I'm a firm believer that it is silly to worry about generating income from the percentage of people who are sophisticated enough to circumvent these kinds of things, whether they be paywalls, pirating drm, or adblockers.  It is almost certainly the case that if someone is using an ad blocker then they werent going to click on your ads -- so asking them to turn off the ad blocker is just silliness.  And i have a hard time believing the 50% figure.

2. It seems to me that the entire internet is being built on this house of cards scam financial bubble that we call internet ads.  Once again a bit of marketing geniuses have figured out how to fleece companies by turning our entire internet into a giant advertising factory -- wrecking havok on our ability to find information on the web, and corrupting every source of information out there, and creating huge incentives to lie, create fake posts and reviews, create fake clicks, etc.  And the losers are the honest content producers and consumers.  The sooner we have an internet revolution and get rid of internet ads the better.  I hope what comes in its place is direct funding of content producers by content consumers and that we can kill the advertising middlemen.

40hz:
the losers are the honest content producers and consumers.
-mouser (March 10, 2013, 08:11 PM)
--- End quote ---

this! :Thmbsup:

TaoPhoenix:
Hmm, goods stuff here. What other angles can I go after?

1. Companies can't stand "stasis". "Grow or bust" is a famous theme in simplistic business advice seminars. Trouble is, sometimes you just can't grow past a certain scale. So let's say a really nice small ad was used for a while, and everything is fine. Then some Biz type decides "we need more ad revenue. Let's make the ad ... bigger!" Uh... oops. There went a 20% *drop* in revenue from upset customers!

2. Re: The "entitlement" claim, most of TV was offered for free via ad revenue for decades, so it's not quite fair to suddenly decide that "it's different on the internet" and that a former TV viewer, now an online article viewer, suddenly became "entitled".

3. The bar for content is just higher. Newspapers were semi-subsidized by "gimmicks" like the comics, classifieds, and a few other things. There was a lot of filler slammed out. Sorry, Craigslist happened, (yes, with problems), web comics have basically pulverized the comic scene for newspapers, and everyone has the same 3 paragraph AP feed. So if it's gonna come to hard cash for content, make it for something that someone(s) really busted hump to write.

Example: Stephen Brill wrote a bone crunching rundown on hospital scam charges. Take a look.
http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/
10 (decent sized pages!) Super important topic. (Which still may not be really hitting national news!)
And it took him *seven months* to write. That's one I might have paid a couple dollars for.

wraith808:
2. Re: The "entitlement" claim, most of TV was offered for free via ad revenue for decades, so it's not quite fair to suddenly decide that "it's different on the internet" and that a former TV viewer, now an online article viewer, suddenly became "entitled".
-TaoPhoenix (March 10, 2013, 11:15 PM)
--- End quote ---

It's actually not different on the internet.  TV is having a hard time with DVRs and such that effectively are Ad-Blockers.  Adapt or die.

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