Idiotic

The Internet advertising industry is committing suicide before our eyes and innocent ad based sites are going to get taken down with the rest. About a month ago, I noticed that my pop-up/under blocker no longer worked on some sites, such as Drudge. Because I believe it was and is unethical to block advertising en masse off the Internet, I simply live with the annoyance in hopes that Mozilla or Apple will soon have an improved pop-up blocker available.

As an aside, I explained my ethical objections to blocking all ads in a lengthy and interesting exchange with Mark a few months ago. I have placed the majority of my argument from that conversation below, which will hopefully still make sense out of the context, although you can read the original discussion in its entirety here and continued here .

Anyway, the problem is that even if I could convince everyone that they are hurting small ad-supported businesses like mine (responsible ones that do not use intrusive advertising such as pop-ups and pop-unders) when they block advertising wholesale, I doubt I can do so if the advertising industry continues to subvert pop-up blockers. Now, more and more people are being introduced to methods of simply blocking the hosts of ad networks, which will be far more destructive to the ecosystem of the Internet than pop-up blocking (which I believe was not destructive at all, but was mostly just a way of blocking a “vulnerability” that could have easily made the Internet unusable).

This circumvention of pop-up blockers is bad, and it is all being done in pursuit of short term revenues. Anyone with half a brain knows that this is just an arms race and that people will buy ad blockers eventually, thereby killing off legitimate uses of advertising while the really slimy, intrusive ads will always continue to find ways to get themselves through.

This, is what I call idiotic. I hope thoughtful computer users everywhere will find ways to only block pop-ups again and not all ads, but I doubt many will feel ethically obligated to do so. Just remember that while most advertising networks are now implementing circumvention techniques, the individual publishers do not by any means agree with what their networks are doing. I'm not sure if the two companies I work with, FastClick and Burst! Media, are doing this yet, but I can assure you that I specifically avoid all pop-up/under ads, as do many responsible sites, and therefore we are not a party to this latest ad network craze. In fact, I recall seeing one site (I do not recall which one) which actually protested to its ad network, Tribal Fusion, for circumventing pop-up blockers; should I become aware of my ad networks employing these techniques, I shall do the same as vocally as possible.

My Case Again Ad Blocking for Ethical Reasons
Written February 13-16, 2005

Just to elaborate a bit more, since you seem interested and I am glad to provide the view from the other side. My main point I like to make is that I too am paying for bandwidth (quite a bit, actually!). If you block the ads, you are taking everything and giving nothing in return. I make nothing off the fact that you pay your ISP money — just like an musician makes nothing off the fact that you pay your ISP to download their music off of a P2P site. A better analogy, perhaps: if you pay money to go into a theme park and then take some small craft vendor's product without paying for it, will that vendor be comforted by the fact that you had to pay to get in and take their product? Probably not, because, just like you, they pay to be in the park with the hope that you will buy their product.

Anyway, while the end user is usually on an unmetered plan, my bandwidth is metered and will cost more if I use up my quota. To the tune of $1-$2 per GB, which can add up fast. If you allow the ads to come through, I take some form of “payment” and you take some “product” and we both come out (hopefully) ahead. I'm all for advocating blocking popups, since they invade your screen rather than staying within the page you requested, but if I trusted government more, I'd push to make general ad blocking illegal, since that is only a little site vendor placing a way of recooping costs on the page you requested.

I've considered setting things up so that my sites would refuse to work if ads were blocked with the option of paying with cash as an alternative. I've never gotten that far, though. I think it would serve its purpose though: few people would want to pay money to read my site, they'd probably much rather ignore my ad banners. Just think, if everyone blocked ads, every site would either have to be non-commercial or subscriber only, which would severely limit what we could find on the Internet without a giant bank account.

As an aside, when people complain about ads, I often encourage the use of Lynx or elinks. Since a text based browser uses less of my bandwidth when visiting my site, less harm is done than if people come and load all the “pretty stuff” but block the only thing that generates the profit that keeps the site going.

Well, anyway, I don't mean to keep going on about this. As you can tell, I've thought a lot about this over the years (I've been serving ads on my sites since 1997).

[…]

Now, to confirm what Ed said, the hit count is totally disconnected from revenue (although a high hit count might make you look interesting to advertisers that figure you must have something good to say). There are two types of major ads — CPM and CPC. CPM is cost per impressions, where I am paid for each ad viewed as in downloaded. Most ad blockers block the ad from being downloaded, therefore I am not paid anything. Then there are the CPC's, which have come to be the advert of choice, and of which I only get paid if you click on the ad. Therefore, in both cases, the ad blocking tools do deprive the site owner of revenue (unlike the similar situation on TV).

The other thing to remember is that since click throughs can be measured quite easily (in fact, every one is counted even on CPM ads), advertisers will notice if a site doesn't provide good click through results, even if an ad blocker was kind enough to download the ad prior to removing it from the page.

[…]

Personally, what I would like to see is a consortium of major ad networks get together and offer a “network wide” service that spans all of their networks. In this system, I could pay a certain dollar amount to avoid seeing so many ads on any network site.

Most people, I believe, given proper education of how revenue is generated from ads (i.e. that ad blocking does indeed stop revenue) and this choice to pay to opt out, would choose to keep viewing ads. I would. But some people hate ads enough that it might be worth $20 extra month not to see any ads.

Personally, I don't mind ads on a page that much. I do block popups/popunders and refuse to carry them on my sites as a matter of principle. I see those as invading the user's computer, even if they don't install adware. But, I don't mind having ads pop up on the sites I use otherwise.

[…]

Back in the day, the internet was free and text based. It can still be free and text based with a browser such as lynx. Lynx never loads the ads, but as I noted, it also doesn't load any other graphics, keeping my bandwidth bill down.