Adblockers - Tools of the Devil, or Satan?

More recently we have Adblock Plus's extortion model of internet revenue:

Quote:

The letter to Twitter, the US company preparing for a $15bn stock market flotation, sounded reasonable enough - if cheeky. "We would like to partner with you to engineer acceptable, non-intrusive advertising," said the blogpost from Adblock Plus. But the sentence’s continuation seemed to carry a veiled threat: “We want you to do it responsibly, by adhering to our Acceptable Ads guidelines.” And if Twitter doesn’t? Then it would remain on the list of sites where adverts are blocked by the browser add-on, which its developer - a Cologne-based company called Eyeo - claims has 30 million daily users, and has been downloaded 200m times. Adblock Plus’s model is straightforward: unless a site is on its “whitelist”, then it blocks all the ads shown there. And, as it makes clear, even big websites whose advertising methods (text only, no flashy gimmicks) it finds acceptable must hand over a share of their advertising revenue for the reward of being on the “whitelist” and showing their ads to visitors. “Small” sites - the precise definition of “small” isn’t given - don’t have to pay if their ads are deemed acceptable. ... PageFair’s data shows that use of ad blocking software – of which there are a number of developers other than Adblock Plus, including Adblock and Adblock Edge – is increasing rapidly. In some particularly tech-savvy sectors, more than a quarter of site visitors block ads, but even general interest sites see between 15% and 20% of visitors using it. In March 2010, technology news site Ars Technica experimented with an outright ban on users who blocked ads. For 12 hours, they were redirected to a blank page, until Ars relented, with editor-in-chief Ken Fisher posting an explanation titled “why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love”, saying: “Imagine running a restaurant where 40% of the people who came and ate didn't pay. In a way, that's what ad blocking is doing to us.”

Linky.



There are many rationalisations I have seen. "They shouldn't do an advertising model in the first place." "I wouldn't click on ads anyway." "They are ugly and intrusive." "The advertisers brought it on themselves." I find them dubious and unpersuasive. I'd say the most plausible are avoiding privacy violations and saving bandwidth on a data cap, but again those don't really counteract the harm done, they merely justify with a selfish (maybe rational, but still selfish) benefit.

Quote:

Everybody loves free online websites, but if Google didn’t make hundreds of billions a year in online advertising revenue, it would have no way to run its services, pay its employees, and support all of its public projects. Sure, you might agree to a $10/month fee to help out some of your favorite sites, but there are a few reasons why this wouldn’t work long-run: Zero-cost websites provide a ton of social, business, and infrastructural tools that a majority of the population in developed nations have learned to use. Free internet services like those provided by Google are responsible for an enormous part of our country’s productivity and GDP (as well as those of other countries, both developed and undeveloped), and it is because they are free. The free-to-use nature of these services encourages adoption, which is far more important than immediate profit because suddenly, your average workforce employee knows how to use corporate-grade calendar, email, and spreadsheet software and depend on them as basic communication and organizational tools. These tools not only augment their own human capital, but also created the demand for internet access that fueled the construction of the global internet infrastructure we have today. Simply put, advertisements are where the internet draws the money to sustain itself and perpetuate this whole cycle of economic development. And because this free-with-ads online publishing model has proven itself to work so well, we now have free photo-sharing sites, news sites that publish exclusively online, and free blogging platforms. Every time you block ads, these are the guys you’re hurting. You aren’t, of course, obligated to look at ads in order to support these websites, but it’s a small price to pay for all the free stuff you get in return. If you value a free service, you should not block their ads. If you want to support a content publisher, whether it’s a YouTube vlogger or the admins of your regular news aggregator, you should not block ads. ... A server with numerically equal capacity as your home desktop might cost $600 a month to operate, including the massive network infrastructure, housing, HVAC, redundant power, and maintenance staff. Your household computer, on the other hand, doesn’t have to run continuously day-and-night, and it isn’t important if a few bits of memory get flipped accidentally or if it breaks down after two years. Some websites that provide online services are big enough that they have to rent out enterprise-class equipment, but not large or important enough that they can start billing their customers. These guys who get stuck in the middle often have no other choice but to sell ad space to pay the bills. Websites aren’t exactly cash cows either. In fact, most big websites spend their first couple years in the red. (Tumblr reportedly only made $14 million in revenue in 2012 while spending $25 million in operating costs.)

Linky.

Quote:

Did you know that blocking ads truly hurts the websites you visit? We recently learned that many of our readers did not know this, so I'm going to explain why. There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won't hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis. If you have an ad blocker running, and you load 10 pages on the site, you consume resources from us (bandwidth being only one of them), but provide us with no revenue. Because we are a technology site, we have a very large base of ad blockers. Imagine running a restaurant where 40% of the people who came and ate didn't pay. In a way, that's what ad blocking is doing to us. Just like a restaurant, we have to pay to staff, we have to pay for resources, and we have to pay when people consume those resources. The difference, of course, is that our visitors don't pay us directly but indirectly by viewing advertising. (Although a few thousand of you are subscribers, and we thank you all very, very much!) My argument is simple: blocking ads can be devastating to the sites you love. I am not making an argument that blocking ads is a form of stealing, or is immoral, or unethical, or makes someone the son of the devil. It can result in people losing their jobs, it can result in less content on any given site, and it definitely can affect the quality of content. It can also put sites into a real advertising death spin. As ad revenues go down, many sites are lured into running advertising of a truly questionable nature. We've all seen it happen. I am very proud of the fact that we routinely talk to you guys in our feedback forum about the quality of our ads. I have proven over 12 years that we will fight on the behalf of readers whenever we can. Does that mean that there are the occasional intrusive ads, expanding this way and that? Yes, sometimes we have to accept those ads. But any of you reading this site for any significant period of time know that these are few and far between. We turn down offers every month for advertising like that out of respect for you guys. We simply ask that you return the favor and not block ads.

Linky.

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