fairdice pointed out this plea from Ars Technica. It makes a point that really *ought* to be obvious, but which a lot of folks are in denial about: ad blocking is very destructive to websites. The Cult of Free has managed to convince most people that they are entitled to read whatever they want, without having to pay for it; the result is that any attempt to require people to pay drives most sites' readership down precipitously. (I note that even the Economist, which costs a fair fortune in paper, is mostly online-readable for free.) The side-effect of that is that sites are utterly dependent on advertising for their revenues, and ad blockers starve that, potentially killing sites.Of course, the article manages to overlook the one very good, very technical reason for ad-blocking: many of those ads are doing a lot more than simply trying to get you to buy a product immediately. A large fraction of them are essentially low-grade spyware, using various techniques to assemble a profile of who you are and what you are interested in, by tracking you across many websites. That profile is the main reason why advertising online is worth money, and why page views matter every bit as much as clicks -- the spyware takes effect when you view the page.
But that said, the original point is a valid one: these sites need to make money somehow. And the shareware principle is very deeply embedded in my soul: if I'm making use of their services, I *should* be contributing to the site somehow. Yes, there are all the rationalizations of the Cult of Free; personally, I find most of them rather selfish and short-sighted. The morality entirely aside, if someone's providing a service I find valuable, it's in my best interest to help keep it running.
Fortunately, Ars (like many sites, and it's a trend I encourage) provides another approach: subscriptions. That is, you don't *have* to pay, but you can choose to instead. No ads, no information leakage through them (although Ars' own privacy policy *does* suck to a surprising degree), and a very quantified contribution to helping run the site. IMO it's rather pricey at $50/year, but if I'm being honest this is probably the single website I use most, so it's worth that much to me...
(And I agree about the subscription fee: that's why I just bought an Ars membership instead of dealing with any of this ad stuff...)
(One of the sites I visit regularly - boardgamegeek.com - gives you control over your ads if you make a donation for the calendar year. That I choose to leave some of them on speaks well to their selection; most sites would not pass that test.)
Also, consider: ad-blocking lowers the effectiveness of advertising only to the extent that those who block ads might have clicked on the things if they were unblocked.(*) How much advertisers are willing to pay sites for hosting ads is (over time) a function of how effective the advertising is. If I'm an advertiser, and I get 30 clickthroughs from 1,000 views, I'm about as happy as if I get 30 clickthroughs from 10,000 views - possibly a touch happier, since my bandwidth costs are lower.
(*) = Barring profile-harvesting / spying on eyeballs, but I have few qualms about blocking that particular avenue.
I agree that supporting sites you care about is a good thing, but I'm not sure that disabling ad-blockers for them is the best way to go about it.
The Ars article addressed this: they claimed that they were paid for impressions, not just for clicks.
Barring profile-harvesting / spying on eyeballs, but I have few qualms about blocking that particular avenue.
And yet, that *is* precisely how big sites generally support themselves. This isn't a creepy exception -- it's how the Web, by and large, works nowadays because it's the *only* way that most large sites have found that they can make enough money to function.
The sort of highly creative fund-raising suggested by the article is great -- but in practice, I've rarely observed anything of the sort that scales well. And (very important) most implementations of it wind up influencing the news that's being reported: the more your advertisers are getting involved in the content, the greater the likelihood of conflict of interest. Sponsors aren't acting out of the love of truth, and their mere existence can bring a lot of pressures to bear that are less significant in simpler interchangeable banner advertising.
(I mean, what we're talking about generally shows up as those "Special Advertising Sections" in major magazines. I *hate* those, precisely because I find them fundamentally untrustworthy.)
Frankly, all of this is my personal argument of why I want a more micro-payment oriented web. I don't love the spyware, but I do recognize that it's an unpleasant compromise solution for how to run a major site. That being the case, I'd much rather just pay a cent or two per pageview directly to the site, rather than deal with all the indirect mechanisms...
Also, I ran across another counter argument.
I mean, a cent or two per article is (I believe) less in practice than the prices typically being charged by the paywalls that *are* being put into place. Remember, this whole line of discussion started with me signing up for Ars Technica -- which is $50/year, and isn't *terribly* unusual at that. (High, but not exceptional.) That probably comes out to about two cents an article for me, but I spend a *lot* of time on Ars: the amortization would probably be worse for a more casual reader.
So the implication of what you're saying is that people have just-plain-unreasonable expectations of how much their information should cost: they're not willing to pay as much as it actually costs to produce the information, amortized per-viewer. It's entirely possible that you're correct -- but the implication, if so, is probably a depressing race to the bottom in terms of quality of information...
We also have an explicit channel for reporting ads that should not be featured on the site, and we expunge them when something untoward shows up.