Some time ago my blog stopped bringing in any sort of revenue. Obviously I suspected adblocking to be the cause but I didn’t see how prevalent it was until tonight.
Youch. That’s ripping every bit of support off of my website.
As you can see from my post about Firefox Extensions I advocate using AdBlock Plus. It’s a very useful tool and rids the web of many annoyances. Many ads deserve to be blocked simply for being so god awfully annoying. Flashing, popping up, producing sounds and so on.
There comes a time, however, when people are just being malicious. To do one’s absolute best to rip any and all support off of a website no matter how unobtrusive and/or benign it may be is out right damaging and cruel to the websites that you visit. Not just to my little blog here, but to whatever your favorite site is. Be it digg.com or some random Joe’s / Jane’s site.
I go out of my way to consider if I have too many ads or if the ad is in any way bothersome. Believe it or not, many site owners who use ads do consider how their visitors feel about it and are probably willing to change their approach to advertisements based on visitor feedback. Don’t like the ad? Contact the site owner and say so. Give your feedback. Don’t be surprised if it gets removed and/or changed based on your comments.
There comes a time when a site visitor has to do something to support the sites that they visit. It’s all responsibility, and frankly, this filter set is down right irresponsible of people.
Not that those with the mentality of a freeloader are going to be at all affected by what’s said in this post or anywhere else. They’ll continue to take, take, and take without ever giving back in the least. It’s what they do. If you’re not like that, however, then you should seriously rethink your use of this filterset for AdBlock. You’re negatively affecting the sites that you like to visit, and you’re doing so in a big way.
I notice that AdBlock Plus has the option to download ads in the background without displaying them. I don’t know if it does this with the filterset installed, or not. It doesn’t matter. Only sites with huge ammounts of traffic get paid for ad views, and even then this type of payment is becoming quite rare (and the pay out by ad view is abysmal).
Far more often than not an ad requires a click to generate any revenue for the website owner/s. In my case, most of my ads don’t bring a thing unless someone actually buys something. The two exceptions to that rule are Chitika and Google AdSense, both of which pay by click.
So this background downloader does nothing for websites, don’t allow yourself to think that you’re supporting your favorite site if you have that option enabled. You’re not.
~Mysk
April 6th, 2006 at Apr 06, 06 | 6:51 pm
I found this site whilst looking for an alternative download source for filtersetG.
I use AdBlock all the time on my own machine and have a much easier time on the internet than most people I know.
I am a power user, and this applies to most things in my life, including shopping. I know that I’m outside the demographic for most advertisers, being mid 30s, British and no fashion victim.
When I want something I go look for the best there is, then find out what the least I can pay for it is; be that a grey import, Ebay, a “sample” or just plain old haggling.
At no time when I am purchasing goods or services do I consider their advertising and I never click on commercials. I mute the Tv when the adbreaks come on and skip pages where the content is drowned out.
Who advertised Google to me? Crucial? HTC PDAs? Who told me to go read Slashdot? Who advertised being married as a route to happiness?
Word of mouth. Reputation. Commitment to customers. Content and usefulness.
When I bought my Lian Li computer case I had never heard of the company, never seen their advertisements, but I was shopping for a case, found aluminium suited my needs and checked the edges inside for blood sacrifice zones. It wasn’t until I had owned a Lian Li case for 6 months that I saw reviews of them and found that they were being hyped as the best on the market.
Who needs advertising? Bandwidth, attention stealing, ruining the flow of a page and the color scheme.
Your ads are here because I haven’t got filtersetG yet, but I haven’t even read them, I see the grey “Ads by Yahoo!” and my eyes automatically avoid the frame.
This is learned behaviour. Ads are a part of life, but most of us who have the choice, or take the trouble to acquire the choice will skip them because we don’t want them.
I’m sorry your blog isn’t making money, but there are plenty of free blogs out there that have just as many spiders scraping them as this site.
OTOH maybe I’m wrong and should go click on every ad once then close the page so that pay-per-click doesn’t even pay?
April 6th, 2006 at Apr 06, 06 | 7:07 pm
Actually your comment is right on the button and it’s why I’ve been using AdBrite’s “Intermission” ads. They receive attention, albeit small ammounts.
Advertising as we know it is such a failed model. Anyone relying on it to make money is going to be sorely disappointed. My behavior matches your’s almost identically, and I’m sure that most people browse that way.
On the flip side I also know that hosting a site isn’t free if you want to do anything personal with it. Wordpress.com, for example, has a heavy handed filter that removes anything exept for basic HTML.
So what to do about it? I think that what it boils down to is providing services to browsers so that they have something to buy. That’s the ideal situation.
Lastly, browsers do need to keep in mind that hitting a web site without paying any attention to the offers on that site is using something for nothing. When it comes to text ads perhaps we should glance their way to see if anything interests us.
At least if we find the post or article to be interesting.
Without doing so we will find that more and more small time folks vanish from the ‘net. Perhaps many think that would be good; clear up the “blog spam” as they may see it. Personally I don’t like the thought of an Internet where the only opinions are those from large businesses with the money to sustain a web presence.
Banners and the like, however, are pretty much kaput.