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The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

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Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#51

Post by hcon »

iagooar wrote: post #29

Maybe you should start building a sustainable business model, instead of whining because people who are annoyed with ads and trackers started effectively blocking them. If your content adds value to your visitors' lives, then charge for it. If the only revenue stream you can rely on is ads, then probably there is a problem with the stuff you offer not being valuable enough to people. I don't want this to sound grumpy…

    > If the only revenue stream you can rely on is ads, 
    > then probably there is a problem with the stuff you 
    > offer not being valuable enough to people.
Not quite.

What people are willing to pay for has a large social/cultural/conditioned element. It's a crux of the entire problem.

The vast majority of people still attribute zero cost to ads. When you start charging $1 for your offering, now you're the one site among your competitors that's charging money. Maybe some HN nerds will care. Whoopdee doo. Nobody else does. The rest of the world isn't going to take their credit card out of their wallet when they can endure a banner ad instead.

Oh wait, they can just install an ad blocker the day they actually do care. Or maybe when their kid or significant other or buddy installs an adblocker on their browser like I did for my parents and they won't even realize the trouble it ever saved them.

See, I think that we will be soon on the cusp of a shift that needs to happen before we can replace ads at all, and it's more than just something a website can do by themselves by adding a paywall or whatever solution that doesn't work for most websites that people seem to conjure up in response to these issues.

Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#52

Post by hcon »

nsomaru wrote: post #45
hcon wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there a reason more sites don't do self hosted ads? Google Adsense (for example) is a live auction clearing house where you paste a snippet of code into your site that resolves into the highest bidder for the keywords on each page. You're done. Meanwhile, hosting your own ads entails finding advertisers, wooing them, developing a relationship with them, maintaining that relationship, negotiating a contract, sett…

Why not build a generic system where ads are served to the server serving the website (which maintains a cache of relevant ads and serves them appropriately)? That way you can get the benefits of a network + the benefits of serving from the same server that is serving the content

Yeah, I'm sure Adsense will let you proxy requests through my server soon or release some similar offering.

It would come at the massive expense of high-quality tracking and thus incur a massive reduction in ad revenue, but it's an imminent trade-off that beats unconditional adblocking.

I think everything is just waiting for the actual tipping point that forces everyone's hand like we always do. Adblockers are still the minority.

Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#53

Post by ufo »

jensen123 wrote: post #42

I think we really, really need cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin. Buying access to stuff online with a credit card is totally inconvenient, and even worse, you have no privacy then. I guess this is part of the reason why sites financed by advertising have become so prevalent. Personally, if there was an easy and private way to do so, I'd much rather pay for content than getting "free" stuff financed by ads. Inevitabl…

Bitcoin stores every single transaction that ever happens in a public ledger.

Not only is it not private but it also will not scale for microtransactions on a massive scale.

Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#54

Post by xorcist »

teddyh wrote: post #39
hannob wrote: post #22

This is so common for the many anti-adblock texts you see these days - they all avoid to talk about the major issues here. (I say that with the background that a significant part of my income comes from ad-financed news pages.) That is: * Security risk through ads (malvertising, ad networks not supporting https etc.). * Ads killing performance (70% CPU for a flash ad is not uncommon). * Privacy (Ad vendors having mos…

Those are all valid reasons, but they are not the reason I first started to block ads: • They impose a surprisingly huge cognitive load. Even if you (like most people nowadays) are used to them and hence “do not notice them”, that very habit of ignoring them actually takes more brain power than you’d think.

That's true! I stopped watching TV somewhere around the high school age, which means I react to it just like small children do: if I'm trying to have a meeting where there's a TV running I turn into almost a drooling idiot.

My brain is simply not conditioned to flashing colors and quick cuts that aren't important. It requires practice to read a text bylined with blinking animations, and I simply don't have the cognitive power to do that. Most people that cope with it probably doesn't realize how much practice they've had.

Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#55

Post by fauigerzigerk »

hannob wrote: post #22

This is so common for the many anti-adblock texts you see these days - they all avoid to talk about the major issues here. (I say that with the background that a significant part of my income comes from ad-financed news pages.) That is: * Security risk through ads (malvertising, ad networks not supporting https etc.). * Ads killing performance (70% CPU for a flash ad is not uncommon). * Privacy (Ad vendors having mos…

I hate ads for all the reasons you cite and because some are hugely distracting.

But small websites are not in a position to change the state of affairs, and if nothing changes and people keep blocking their ads, they're going to be dying in large numbers.

As a result, everything will be locked into app stores with even less privacy and with many restrictions on the type of content that is allowed.

The sort of answers I am looking for are the ones that do not pit small websites against users.

Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#56

Post by jensen123 »

ufo wrote: post #53
jensen123 wrote: post #42

I think we really, really need cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin. Buying access to stuff online with a credit card is totally inconvenient, and even worse, you have no privacy then. I guess this is part of the reason why sites financed by advertising have become so prevalent. Personally, if there was an easy and private way to do so, I'd much rather pay for content than getting "free" stuff financed by ads. Inevitabl…

Bitcoin stores every single transaction that ever happens in a public ledger. Not only is it not private but it also will not scale for microtransactions on a massive scale.

> Bitcoin stores every single transaction that ever happens in a public ledger.

Ok, I admit I'm not a Bitcoin expert. But if I buy Bitcoin with cash, or mine some myself, is this really a problem?

Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#57

Post by hcon »

SixSigma wrote: post #9
Oletros wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we want to read their reviews and participate in their forums.

How much in $ terms is that worth to you? Work it out and send guru3d a payment

Obviously nobody does that.

My favorite example is when you see a popular github repository with a donate button (Flattr, Bitcoin address, etc) only to realize they've made a whole $14 in the past year. Wow, thanks world!

It turns out that ads worked because the user didn't actually have to do anything. They didn't have to get their credit card out of their wallet, something they rarely do on the internet.

And when they do, it's to give money to a large corporation like Netflix or because Jimmy Wales managed to beg for donations in a more invasive annoying way than a banner ad ever was. (You know, I never once had to see the face of the founder of AdultFriendFinder in one of their ads.)

I hope we find a next-coming middleground that changes the culture of what people are willing to pay for and how they do it. But the fact that giving your credit/debit card number to someone gives them (and anyone else) unlimited charge license on your account is not helping.

Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#58

Post by WizardlySquid »

Whenever I read something like this I feel really bad and turn off my ad blocker, as soon as I do that I'm usually greeted with 2 minute long unskippable ads, sites re-skinned with ads, targeted ads, ads that are just straight up spam, ads that play in the background and ads that require me to fill out a survey. I want to support these websites but online ads don't pay nearly as much as TV, radio or print ads but that are 10 times more annoy, detrimental to my privacy and if I ever click on them I know their almost certainly going to be some sort of phishing scam or virus from eastern Europe. You know it sucks that people are blocking ads but online ads are the absolute worst, if online ads functioned and payed as much as print advertisements than I don't think anyone would have a problem with seeing ads but we all know they don't. Only thing I can recommend is that these sites change their business model or at least augment it with a mixture of merch, internet begging (patreon), premium memberships and being more choosy with what ad networks they choose to partner with.

Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#59

Post by z3t4 »

When running a business, you need to spend 50% of your time on the business-part and the other 50% on providing content, serving your customers, etc.

With ads, you let the ad-network do the business-part, while only taking 10%-50% of your turn-over. You can spend 100% of your time making content, etc. Especially small businesses are happy with that model.

The ads where good for content, as more content was created. But it's now leaving a huge gap of opportunity!

Then there's also product discovery. We need new ways for people to discover more content that they are interested in.

Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#60

Post by hughperkins »

hcon wrote: post #51
iagooar wrote: post #29

Maybe you should start building a sustainable business model, instead of whining because people who are annoyed with ads and trackers started effectively blocking them. If your content adds value to your visitors' lives, then charge for it. If the only revenue stream you can rely on is ads, then probably there is a problem with the stuff you offer not being valuable enough to people. I don't want this to sound grumpy…

> If the only revenue stream you can rely on is ads, > then probably there is a problem with the stuff you > offer not being valuable enough to people. Not quite. What people are willing to pay for has a large social/cultural/conditioned element. It's a crux of the entire problem. The vast majority of people still attribute zero cost to ads. When you start charging $1 for your offering, now you're the one site among…

So what they should do is, what Android apps do:

- when you first go to the website, you get the ad-infested website

- you can pay for the app, and now, no more ads. In Android apps, the amount tends to be crazy low, like less than a cup of coffee. Pay that and get no ads is a no-brainer really...

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