The Web and Advertising

Ars Technica have recently put up a post about advertising on their site. They discuss their business reliance on advertising, the effect of running ad-blockers on their site and some trials of methods they’ve used to combat them.

The site has caused a lot of discussion from all sides. Those with an inflated sense of self-entitlement, those that feel that ad-blocking is stealing, and those that want to find a solution that will please both camps…

I used to run an ad-blocker with a very broad blocklist, because ads annoyed me. If I had thought about it I probably would have said “If you don’t want to give it away from free, take it off the web or don’t complain that I block annoying ads”.

However, the more I did think about it, I came to realise a few things…

• Ad-blockers are a product of a market at work. People were able to reduce the cost of viewing a page or site with very little inconvenience to themselves.
• Most of the complaints about ad-blockers aren’t about blocking their ads, rather blocking all advertising without even giving them a chance, as the ad-blocker came with a very broad blacklist
• Ad-blockers also objectify a market failure. The feedback loop between consumer and producer is broken. With no ad-blockers, if a sites advertising was unacceptable, people would stop visiting. With ad-blockers, it doesn’t work like that. Ars’ anti-adblock techniques were a misguided attempt to fix this: If you don’t like the ads, don’t view the content. If the ads are unacceptable, vote with your feet.

Seemingly, a lot of content providers are happy with “Free” or “Freemium” business models… For instance I have no problem writing on here for everybody to read. Where they draw the line is paying. I imagine that the majority of sites that have advertising is to reach break even point.

Most people don’t seem to oppose the idea of advertising on their sites, as long as they are relevant, unobtrusive and useful. I’ve clicked on plenty of Google search ads, along with the better ad networks such as Fusion, The Deck and even ShopStyle.

In my opinion, the best fix for the situation is two-part:

Content producers should not use brute-force, spammy (think of the vibrating “You’re the 999th visitor, you’ve won…”, Evony and the system error message lookalike) and untargeted ads. They should be running ads that are relevant and unoffensive, and their audience may even find useful. Adsense text ads are a good start.

For this to work, however, consumers that insist on running ad-blockers need to be more selective about who they block, and why. Block-by-default is not going to work.

Ars’ move to detect & deny content to people running ad blockers wasn’t a complete backfire – they didn’t convince people that blocking ads is stealing, but they got their members to think about why ads are run and things you can do to view content and still not have annoying ads, resulting in a what seems to be a few subscription sales and a bunch of AdBlock whitelisting. Goes to show what a little engagement can achieve.

I think the solution to this particular problem hasn’t quite materialised yet, but it sure as hell isn’t increasingly intrusive adverts, or paywalls. If I were to guess, I would say that it would look something like Flattr.