The choice is between 1000 of whom 10 are using adblock or perhaps 900 with no one using adblock. Allowing those 10 to use adblock means more people will see and click on the ads than if you block them from the site and they and their friends and their friend’s friends and their friend’s friend’s friends go elsewhere. Of course if those using ad block are really good at spreading the word then it may be a choice between the 1000 with 10 blocking the ads or 50 with no one blocking the ads.
Well, it’s always possible I’ve been reading something different all along
But, it’s also possible that the #1 post somewhat mislead me:
One thing I’m sure I’m not misreading: how does
10 users without ad block than 100 users using ad block
qualifies as quality over quantity?
Simply because a user doesn’t have ad blocking plug-in means quality? How is that? Do they automatically point-and-click ads just because of not having such a plug-in? Do they contribute with quality content just because of not having such a plug-in? Because, like here on SP, I’m sure some users are also contributors, helping you making a site successful.
Bottom line is, you first rely on users to make your site desired. Quality users If you start imposing stupid rules, then, no matter how you try and spin it, your site is the one going to get hurt. Yes, you can fool your self that you will make some users behave the way you want. But ad blocking plug-in users are quality users, users that know what they’re doing. Hence, your stupid rule will leave you with only the weakest web users out there. And that, my friend, like it has been said many times before, means your site is already dead.
Just because you handpicked some phrases and made it bold, red and all pretty doesn’t make it the main point of the thread. Maybe I’m nuts but I always think the main point of a thread is its title! in this case "Your Thoughts on Ad Block Browser Plugin? "
It’s all about context. Quality in relation to the website owners’ intention which is to make money through displaying ads
You don’t have to worry about sites going to die or hurt just because they are blocking some adblock users… sounds a bit apocalyptic…
IMO you have just given a sales pitch, whether you realize it or not, for the AdBlock plugin!?
And to answer your question, I do not feel any means of ad blocking should be made illegal.
Ditto
The main reason I use Adblock Plus is to get rid of annoying peel down menus. Or any other highly intrusive ad which prevent me from effectively using a site. If I didn’t have the ability to block such type of ads, I would leave the site and not go back. As for most other ads, it is easier for me to ignore them, if I am not interested.
Hey look, I represent an advertisement company but I’ll be as objective as possible.
Ads are not pretty and just as felgall said, and you called him naive (NOT!), those looking for an ad blocker simply ignore ads – there is the case where the ad is catchy or highly targeted, like your hobby and you don’t want to avoid it but generally they won’t.
Illegal? No way. As long as people need it to remove ads from being seen they are here to stay, it resolves a problem for them. There are pros and cons versus the TV media, and to be honest there are little cons but the fact that you can’t block TV ads is a + for the advertisers on that industry niche.
Now if your income is getting totally killed because of this (although I doubt the adoption rate of ad-blockers is that high – if somebody knows the %, please post!) try focusing on other streams, like affiliate marketing for instance or selling your own product and so on.
No, I don’t buy that at all. What is the difference between a surfer who uses a browser add-on to block ads and one who just ignores them? Pretty much nothing. You’ll get the same revenue from both – absolutely diddly-squat. If you use Google Ads or most other mainstream services, you get no income for adverts displayed, only for adverts clicked on. Am I stealing from you if I visit your site and don’t click on an advert? What about the advertisers – am I stealing from them if I click on an advert that I have no intention of following through, purely to help you profit from your website?
There’s no such condition. There are many reasons why ads may not be visible. Would you block anyone whose browser doesn’t support Flash, or who has it switched off? How about people using screen readers, would they be denied access just because they can’t look at the ads?
If it were possible it makes perfect sense to me to block users that have ad-blockers.
A nice message like: Please unblock your ads to view this website.
To which I would send back the not-so-nice message “:x off”. And then I would do just that. The chances are that any website putting up that “nice” (really??) message is going to have intrusive adverts that get in the way of the content, and it won’t be worth the effort.
Have you thought through what the effect of that would be? Most likely that your site would disappear off the bottom of the search results because Googlebot would be rudely sent away without seeing any content … your choice, if that’s what you want.
Its already hard enough to make any money off Web content. You are saying in addition to building the site and providing the platform we need to go through some additional marketing strategy. This creates a significant barrier to entry.
The money has to come from somewhere, it isn’t free money. At the moment, it’s paid for by advertisers, but that isn’t a bottomless pot – there is only so much that they will pay in total. The more ‘false clicks’ they get from people who have no intention of buying anything from them, the less they will pay per click.
As I said above, very few ad services pay/charge per impression, because that is too flaky a method and is too easily subverted by hiding ads out of the normal viewing area; advertisers don’t want to pay for an ‘impression’ on an advert that has been loaded by the browser but isn’t seen by the surfer. Equally, they don’t want to pay for an advert that lots of people look at but nobody clicks on. That’s why most services now charge/pay per click.
The only times I have ever clicked on an advert were (i) to check that the ads on my own website were working, (ii) by accident (several times), and (iii) when eBay was advertising on the most ridiculous keywords, just out of sheer devilment.
It’s perfectly fair. No-one has a right to make money out of a website. Simply publishing content is no guarantee of income. If the only purpose of putting your content online is to make money from adverts then that’s a poor business model. For a start, advertising revenue is flaky and inconsistent at the best of times; you are relying on a delivery model over which you have no control, no (or minimal) control over which adverts are shown, no control over what payments are made. It is unlikely that advertising will give enough long-term growth to be a sustainable model for many more years anyway, even without the increasing number of blocking services.
You don’t care about any part of the process other than someone giving you money, you’re quite happy to take money from the advertisers even if your visitors don’t give them a penny. Advertising is a good way to supplement the business model, but as the sole purpose? No thanks.
If you think your content is that good, create a subscription service. And I’ll lay good money that it will fail spectacularly (unless it’s pr0n, maybe). Because people aren’t prepared to pay for content. And there are enough other websites that will offer them what they want without having to pay or suffer adverts that they will just bypass your site completely.
Really? I’d rather that 100 people saw my website, read the contents and had a positive experience of the site than that 10 people did. The vast majority of successful websites do have a real purpose beyond “get people to click on ads”, and while the sites may be supported by advertising, they go far beyond that. If a surfer visits my site using AdBlock, that’s fine – the chances are that they wouldn’t have clicked on the adverts anyway.
Are you sure about that? Google gives advertisers an option to buy impressions, so does Facebook. I don’t know most ad services but I think buying impressions is popular enough as it can work out better for advertisers than CPC on case by case basis. Maybe very few ad services charge only per impression (or rather per thousand impressions).
Regardless, I don’t think it matters. The blockers most likely block the requests before they are made, and even if they didn’t, the advertisers would work out the value of running ads on a particular site fairly quickly.
You’re a third person to say this in this thread. I wonder what you are basing this on, guys. Is it a general “feeling” or a tendency you see? Because I don’t. Online business in general is growing and until it stops and turns around, online advertising will continue to do just as well.
Tell that to Clickbank. Most of the products in their marketplace are selling content that can be found somewhere else free. Their sales counter says $1.7 billion.
When the advertiser buys impressions the advertiser benefits directly from some people who are not interested in their product using an ad blocker. The number of impressions displayed that lead to a sale will be less because some of those not interested at all have blocked the ad from being downloaded at all.
It also saves the ad network money because they save bandwidth by not serving the blocked ads. It also saves the visitor money because they too save bandwidth.
The result of the advertiser having to pay for fewer impressions for the same number of sales and the ad network saving the cost of bandwidth is MORE money for the web site owner who displays the ads - all thanks to some people blocking the ad.
Sorry felgall, these are pretty anemic arguments. In almost all cases, most people would rather not see ads. This true in all mediums TV, Radio, Print. This doesn’t mean they don’t work. In many cases, ads reinforce a brand whether or not you actually click on the ad.
The bandwidth argument is also pretty weak because the amount of bandwidth used for most ads is pretty minuscule. How may Internet users actually pay by the bandwidth they use anyway?
If your going to block ads, at least face the truth that you are hurting site owners. The collective effect of this is significant for those of us trying to make a modest earning off of our work.
The bandwidth argument is also pretty weak because the amount of bandwidth used for most ads is pretty minuscule.
Come over to my house and watch the minute-long fun that is waiting for a bazilliong servers to get their job done at retarded sites like DeviantArt. And not even most of the servers are serving ads. I have a pretty good connection, but I always notice when multiple servers have to send content to some page I’m at. Blocking Javascript really helps though.
Frankly any page with a bunch of little widgets on it take forever to load. Unless you block them. I don’t use ad blockers. But I block 3rd-party content unless I have to allow it. I’m not paying through the nose for this fast internet connection just so I can sit as long as I did on dial-up to get content pages.
How may Internet users actually pay by the bandwidth they use anyway?
How many users roam on mobile phones? Not all mobiles pay for bandwidth, but that’s an area of popular concern. When web developers talk about using server side sniffing to tell mobiles apart so as to send them fewer ginormous images and sprawling bloated scripts, it’s for bandwidth reasons more than anything (and so also speed of loading).
I’m not saying any of this as arguments against your point, just responding to those points above.
and many people use the ad breaks in tv shows to get something to eat or visit the toilet. Many these days have PVRs where they can start recording a two hour TV show and start watching it ad free a half hour later and still see the finish at about the same time.
The one difference with the internet is that most visitors have to PAY to see the ads.
If you are in a country where you don’t have to pay for the bandwidth you use then you are extremely lucky. Almost all countries allow the ISPs to charge either by time (for dialup) or bandwidth (for broadband). I had two months this year where I ran out of bandwidth just before the end of the month and was reduced to dialup speed for a day or two if I didn’t want to buy more bandwidth at a fairly high price. Blocking all the ads may just have been enough to keep me under the limit for an extra day (since the ISP only checks the bandwidth used once a day).
Where you are not paying specifically for bandwidth the ISP must be averaging out everyone’s usage and charging on that basis in which case all the other people blocking ads are helping YOU to save money on your internet connection by bringing down the average usage.
NOT hurting - helping since those who block ads mean that there is more income from the advertiser to reach the site owner for the ads that do get displayed. Also a significant fraction of my income comes from web page advertising and I wouldn’t want to risk that income by driving away the miniscule fraction of visitors who block ads as those people have lots of friends who don’t block ads and I want them recommending my site to those friends and not getting them to leave as well.
Face facts. Any site that tries to FORCE people to do anything is only hurting themselves as people will leave and go somewhere where they have a free choice. There will never be many sites to force people to view ads because they will soon have no visitors left to view those ads.
Of course if you WANT to drive all your visitors away by forcing them to view ads then by all means do so as all the other site owners competing against you will love you for sending all your visitors to them instead of keeping them for yourself.
The only ads I actually block are the ones from Kontera that do not work iin my browser anyway. Why should I download a huge JavaScript from their site when all it iis going to do is to slow down the loading of web pages and waste the bandwidth I pay for? I don’t use an ad blocker to do it either, I just pointed their ad server domain to 127.0.0.1 in my hosts file.
Advertisements provide us with useful information.For the public, these advertisements are forced upon them and they don’t really care who is featured in them.Forced Ads: Popup + Banner-Bottom.Perhaps it is not advertising that should be blamed. Rather we need to strengthen the law about advertisements.And what about search engines that allow anyone to use a brand name in an advertisement?
Why would it be illegal for customers to have preferences?
For example, you own a bookstore, not an e-store or website, but a regular real world hardware bookstore. You can send people ads by the newspaper, ads by several kinds of services delivered by postmen.
In my own country, we can get legal stickers from our government with the message that we don’t want ads in our mailbox. And we can glue it on the front of our mailbox, so the postman knows he does not have to put ads in our mailbox.
It’s like that same kind of … “plugin” to put in a browser to avoid you get those ads.
Anyway, owning a non-e-business, (read: normal business) is aswel not free, maintaning, personal costs, … not free.
It’s a choice you make. Business is always with costs included. And getting out of costs by showing ads is not a healthy business. You should get out of costs without ads, ads need to be a surplus on your normal sales turnover.
You don’t run an e-business with the hope you can catch as many visitors with ads. People have to come to your website because they search your product, not vice versa.
Wow, this topic is on the front page twice! Must be pretty important.
That being said, I’m one of those that feels I should be allowed to block ads if I want to. And I do. I absolutely loathe them. There’s nothing more irritating that reading an article when there are 10 banners trying to grab my attention and distracting me from reading the article. If the author of that article feels I’m stealing from them by blocking their ads (not that I’m ever going to click on them), then he shouldn’t put his content online.
Sites that tell me I have to disable AdBlock Plus to read their stuff… well, I just surf to different sites. Their loss, not mine.
And as for ads on TV, that’s what my remote is for. As soon as they start, I go watch something else.
in your country, can you demand that when you enter the bookstore, all ads be removed from your view? if not, there’s nothing to compare between a website and a real world shop.
your comparison would make more sense if we were talking about spam arriving at your email box
Something else to think about… when I started webdesign years ago, I had my first test homepage at Geocities.com,
Their plan: in turn for ads, I got a free hosting: fair enough.
But after some time… I didn’t want my users to see this annoying ad everytime they visited my site. The main purpose was they needed to see my content, and second: the ads ****ed up my design.
Now I pay for webhosting, to get rid of ads… like lots of you guys do too.
And creating your own ads to spread around the net is so polluting. The only thing people place or create ads is to make money out of it. NOT ON MY WEBSITE.
If you start imposing stupid rules, then, no matter how you try and spin it, your site is the one going to get hurt. Yes, you can fool your self that you will make some users behave the way you want. But ad blocking plug-in users are quality users, users that know what they’re doing. Hence, your stupid rule will leave you with only the weakest web users out there. And that, my friend, like it has been said many times before, means your site is already dead.