Adblocking...

It's a controversial issue, about whether it's 'right' to block advertisements on websites and such not, but one part of this kinda bugs me about the responses...

That they assume ads not paying will mean every website will become paid. Short answer... no it won't. A decent amount of people for example are running sites purely because they want to, other websites just wouldn't get enough paying visitors to cover server costs so wouldn't bother until at least they became popular, and the whole premise assumes the internet is like a monopoly and nobody does something 'different' (aka, free website access) to quickly snatch up a ton of members, or does the Invision Power Board style bait and switch (keep service free, charge when it becomes massively popular).

In that sense, I don't think adblock will ever really 'destroy' the internet as some naysayers suggest. Heck, consider the next point too...

Most people don't use such programs or add ons. They're not currently built into most browsers, and many people don't have much expertise in that area of the internet or technology. Many for example just use Internet Explorer and Windoes straight out the box without changing or installing anything. Those won't be blocking advertisements, will they?

Nor will the people in school/college, or at work who actually can't add programs or add ons to programs due to the security settings and archaic browser choices made by the computer techs.

So in my opinion, unless Internet Explorer or Firefox suddenly have adblock built in out the box, it won't even make a tiny bit of difference to the internet in general, and even then, websites won't suddenly go the paid subscriptions route (because you need to give people an incentive to pay for content or services).

Anyone agree?

 

I believe you are saying that there will always be a large number of people viewing the site and seeing the ads. I agree.

But no one (that I know) is going to click on the ads, which is how I believe how google ads pays, unless the ads are of interest to them.


My opinion on advertising is that for it to be effective, it needs to be of interest to the people viewing a site, and not an overwhelming amount of it either.

At ask.com a few years ago it was so cluttered with mouse overs and other ads that I refused to visit. They seemed to have toned those down and because there is content of interest I visit more now.

 

Well the point about clicking the ads is because very, very few ads are ever that relevant to the content. No seriously, they need a better way of matching them up to content, since I've seen far too many weight loss ads and scam ads on sites with content nothing like that.

 

I serve the ads directly from our hosting account. At least that was my solution.

 

I don't use an adblocker, only Opera's in-built Popup blocker.

If I have problems with ads (If they have a ton of them, and its causing problems for the browser due to all my open tabs) I'll disable Javascript on that site.