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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

#241

Post by lazyjones »

jhall1468 wrote: post #226
lazyjones wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When only one solution eventually exists, it doesn't make it the preferred solution, it makes it the nuclear option. [...] I'm suggesting that advertising-supported businesses are eventually going to have one remaining option. That isn't slanted rhetoric. That's common sense. Unless of course we come up with a completely new way for content creators to earn a living with their content outside of charging for it, or…

> Why would it become the only option when other forms keep popping up? Even with very hypothetical 100% penetration of (unblockable) ad blockers, this won't be the case. Name me one other form of a successful website that does not use one of the following methods of monetization: ads, donations, currency-exchange or none (free) Because none of those are recent. > You must have missed the NY times, the largest german…

> Name me one other form of a successful website that does not use one of the following methods of monetization:

My former company (founded in 2000; majority sold in 2014; ~2.5 million users) has 95% revenue from other sources than those you named, it's a price comparison website. Most competitors operate in a similar fashion. Ads are used only as an insignificant additional revenue source (with lots of doubt and disputes internally).

Other examples: large classified ad pages, dating websites, real estate brokers (syndicated/search websites), airbnb, hotel and flight booking sites.

> Because I'm not talking about organizations that already have millions of customers as a base.

OK, how about the newly founded austrian branch of swiss publication NZZ - it started with 0 users and paywall.

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

#242

Post by 13thLetter »

DanBC wrote: post #95
JupiterMoon wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dislike like spam and adverts in roughly equal measure and I've never heard of this Boulder Pledge. > But people the people who created those early spam filters - they all signed the Boulder Pledge. They all agreed that not only would they block spam, but they would also never ever buy a product promoted with spam. And people that use spam filters on a daily basis just like the fact that they don't get as much spam…

> I dislike like spam and adverts in roughly equal measure and I've never heard of this Boulder Pledge. How old are you? How long have you been using the Internet? Do you remember the time before commercial use of the WWW?

I've also been using the internet since long before the WWW even existed. I was there for MAKE.MONEY.FAST. Never heard of this "Boulder Pledge."

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

#243

Post by nine_k »

jhall1468 wrote: post #187
njharman wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine. If paywalls is the business model that works (I don't think it is for most content (it's really just not worth anything even ad eyeball time)) then that is how it will be. I'm not a huge "free-market" proponent. But markets exist, and they aren't magic. They smove to solution(s) that the market wants / willing to "pay" for. Pay in broadest sense, money, eyeballs, time, etc. As a business you can fight a…

> That's fine. If paywalls is the business model that works (I don't think it is for most content (it's really just not worth anything even ad eyeball time)) then that is how it will be. This argument is already so tired. When you limit all options to one, that option has to be taken whether or not it is a good option. If everyone blocked every advertisement indiscriminately there would be no other option available b…

I'd be fine with paying to access several latest issues of a periodical. A periodical might as well be fine with making historical issues available for free, since they'd drive more visitors to pay for new content, expectedly also high-quality.

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

#244

Post by imgabe »

jhall1468 wrote: post #220
imgabe wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They do want it, but for free. Yes, this is relatively common. People will take something for free that they aren't willing to pay for. Other things they'll pay one amount for, but not a larger amount. Everybody decides for him or herself how much something is worth to them. If the majority of people decide that value is "nothing, not even looking at an ad", then that's what the value of that thing is. That's how m…

This is a load of BS. The reality is most people install a blocker and never think twice. Your implication that people make a value decision for every website they visit is laughable, and more importantly, exactly the opposite of what most people do.

> most people install a blocker

This is exactly the point. People have to actively seek out and find an ad blocker. They experience the Internet with ads, then decide that it is not worth it. It doesn't just happen. So what is your argument? That people are idiots and cannot correctly assess how valuable something is to them?

Personally, I've whitelisted sites that are known to have useful and unobtrusive ads. I've also supported other sites and apps that I like directly, by giving money, buying a paid version, or buying branded merchandise. There are options other than ads.

I think it's quite possible to detect when someone is using an ad blocker. If publishers really think it's a problem, they can easily disable the site for anyone with an active ad blocker. So why don't they do it? I've seen a few sites take this approach. I happily left and never went back. Like I said before, there's no real reason I need to read one particular article rather than another one in any given moment. If I need the information for something specific, I'll pay for it.

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

#245

Post by jveld »

I'm in favor of a move from ad-based to paywalled content. It just feels more honest to sell your content than your readers (or viewers, visitors, etc).

There's also a mental hygeine aspect: I've noticed a pretty distinct correlation between my total exposure to online advertising and my ability to reach states of deep focus. For example, I've been finding it extremely difficult to finish books for the past few years. But since February or so, as my exposure to online ads has dropped to nearly zero, I've knocked half a dozen challenging non-fiction works off my hit list, and a few novels to boot. And it's not just mental stamina -- my moment to moment engagement and comprehension is also much higher.

This observation is anecdotal, and furthermore, poorly controlled, so establishing causality is pretty difficult. But I have noticed that when I DO browse facebook or other ad-heavy sites, I experience a significant drop in my level of mental energy, often for hours after I'm off the internet. It's as if viewing ads, which are designed to grab one's attention, forks a process in my brain whose task is to react to the ad content, thus depleting my brain-hardware resources. The social hooks make facebook a particularly bad culprit.

BUT, there's a big caveat. I don't want subscriptions -- at least, not on every site that sometimes puts out content that I like. That would cost me hundreds of buxx a month that I simply can't afford. There needs to be a decent micropayment solution so that people can buy the content that they actually want without the overhead of paying for a bunch of stuff they don't care about. I speculate that this would be a pure win for content companies. Right now, paywalls are more like "go-away-walls." If there were buttons on paywalls that said "Read this article for 50 cents," I would personally be paying for a lot more articles. There's probably even a good business opportunity in mediating these transactions to centralize signups and aggregate purchased content.

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

#246

Post by jessaustin »

greggman wrote: post #140
junto wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sites need to consider going back to the pre-Double-Click world, where they self hosted and self managed ads. I'd accept that without issue. I don't mind ads, I just can't accept the intrusive tracking, including being retargeted.

I don't think that's what will happen. Ad firms will come up with a server side API you plug into your website so ads can come through your site. You've just made the security problem worse not better as coming from the same site they are allowed to read everything that site does vs coming from iframes from different domains in which case they are allowed to read nothing.

At least in this scenario sites would be able to track how much of their poor performance is caused by ad networks. (hint: a bunch!)

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

#247

Post by bigbugbag »

jhall1468 wrote: post #183
bigbugbag wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had you read the argument about paying for content not freeing us from being targeted by advertisers, you would have noticed it is based on showing buying power, something micro payment is not really doing. If you want solutions you can look at patreon, flattr, crowdfunded websites, wikipedia,…

> Had you read the argument about paying for content not freeing us from being targeted by advertisers, you would have noticed it is based on showing buying power, something micro payment is not really doing. "Not really doing" doesn't exactly encouraging. You are making assumptions based on an idea that's never been tested, let alone shown to work. I think it's an interesting idea that may work for some content, and…

Sorry I didn't understand what you wrote in the first part.

For the other part, the point was not to invent something new but to give a few examples of how to support websites financially without relying on ads.

I don't understand where you read that I said every website should/could be non-profit, everyone is welcome to try to make a profit out of a website but if this fails they should not point to their visitors exercising the ability given to them by the very nature of the web.

Neither did I say that every form of content can happily survive, actually if 9gag disappeared tomorrow this would not make me sad, but I'll take the opportunity to go deeper here. Let's focus on the need to monetize website which raises from the cost of hosting and traffic, which in turn comes from issue in how we do internet.

When we move away from the peer to peer nature of internet to centralized servers, we create the very cost I was mentioning earlier. When for some reason we went from symmetrical dialup to asymmetrical broadband it prevented us from hosting our own content at no additional cost.

So maybe we'll see something new arise where there will be no place for ads, maybe something p2p taking advantage of blockchain technology. There are already experimentation in this direction such as http://zeronet.io/

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

#248

Post by thesteamboat »

adekok wrote: post #110
DanBC wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm very sorry for content-makers who've hitched their financial wagons to ads, I wish things were easier for you, I really do, but I'm not going to view ads, nor am I going to feel bad about. No more so than if you had made the poor choice of relying on spam for financial support. People who hated spam signed the Boulder Pledge. People who hate ads tend to say fuck you, I'm blocking the ads but taking the bandwidt…

> People who hate ads tend to say fuck you, I'm blocking the ads but taking the bandwidth anyway. You ever see stats on ads taking the bandwidth? http://betanews.com/2015/08/25/ad-blocker-crystal-massively-... The ad vendors business model depends on the user paying for the ads. Why in living hell are they complaining? I am subsidizing their crappy business model. If I want to stop subsidizing them, it's my right.

I think this link was posted here a little while ago:

https://medium.com/@robleathern/carriers-are-making-more-fro...

The article is exactly what it says on the tin: You are charged more (roughly 16x) for the data inherent in the ad than the publisher makes for serving it.

In an ideal world with perfect coordination, we'd agree to just directly send the publisher a quarter of what the current ad data costs us, and everybody relevant wins.

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

#249

Post by jessaustin »

cm2187 wrote: post #203
JoshTriplett wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, the tracking becomes specific to the site visited (same origin policy), not cross-websites, and I don't have a problem with that. You're assuming the server-side scripts won't share data with a central server.

They might but how would they correlate me on abc.com and me on xyz.com if they don't have some form of cookie? Browser fingerprinting is the only way I can think of, and between the phasing out of flash, java and silverlight, and having javascript disabled by default, browser fingerprinting is pretty much toothless.

If they're talking to a central ad server they can tell it what cookies they're seeing.

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

#250

Post by rasz_pl »

intrasight wrote: post #113

I use uBlock Origin. I don't block ads - I block 3rd party requests. People that complain about ad blocking are indeed missing the mark. I'm fine with ads - really. But if you want them seen, you are going to have to serve them yourself. There is no going backwards - for reasons spelled out by others in this thread. So if your business depends on ads, then you are in the ad business. Web sites are going to have to be…

You describe patronage, sponsored content, product placement.

Hey, this gpu shootout brought to you by Nvidia, and ASUS!

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