I use Ad-Block Plus. I have done since I first heard of it, a couple of years ago. I think it’s brilliant. I think ads on the Internet are annoying and intrusive and that they fundamentally don’t work — I either don’t look at them, or I want them out of my face, or I resent the bandwidth they’re sucking up. The only time I turn it off is when I am shopping. On those occasions, sponsored links seem pretty much as likely to yield relevant results as organic search.
Yeah, but Ian, you’re killing the web.
I wha…?
Yeah. You see all the sites you use — YouTube and Google and the Guardian and all those blog publishers. They’re sustained by advertising. Especially the web 2.0 sites that you’re constantly banging on about.
But I don’t click on them. And I don’t look at them. And I hate them.
Doesn’t matter. The media owners sell them by the thousand page views — CPM — if you don’t load the ad, then they don’t get paid.
So loading ads that I hate, don’t look at and never click on is better?
Of course it isn’t. There are some false analogies been drawn here. This isn’t the equivalent of free riding — avoiding paying your ticket on public transport so everyone else has to pay for you when the fare prices go up. It’s not even like reading someone else’s newspaper over their shoulder because you’re too mean to buy your own. Advertising is not a necessity to me: it maybe to you, media owner or brand manager, but I don’t care. For me, and most people, being forced to look at adverts is more like the cinema scene in A Clockwork Orange where Alex has his eyes pinned open and is subjected to an endless barrage of images of grotesque cruelty.
The big argument seems to be that the free web depends on advertising. That the democratic access to publishing that the blog revolution and web 2.0 allows means that sites that gather a readership can make money. That you can start your own publishing company, like weblogs.inc, gawker or shiny, without having major capital backing from the start. You know what? I couldn’t give a shit. What makes you think that you should earn money even though your publication preferences are different from my consumption preferences? I owe you nothing, online publisher. Eat it down.
How about this.
(a) Instead of advertising, media owners and service owners go for a paid model. If their stuff is good enough, people will pay. I pay for several magazines on subscription, and a lot more on a whim; I would do the same for content of similar quality and relevance on the web. Many professional journals already operate on this model. Make your stuff worth something to me. Similarly, I pay for a lot of the software I use on my computer — of course I’d pay for software of the same quality on the web. This is the Internet, of course, though, which has historically been free of commerce — there will be free alternatives to what you offer. So raise your game and make it better: if you’re doing this full-time, then it ought to be a hell of a lot better than what us hobbyists can produce.
(b) If brands want to interact with me, then they give me something of value. Money (or money-off, a more realistic scenario) normally does the trick. As do freebies. Helpful information or services might work. Sometimes even a cool video or a flash game might be enough. Probably, if people were clever, then they’d work with popular online publishers to make people aware of this good stuff. That’s not an endorsement of advertorial: if the stuff is good and relevant, then it will deserve editorial attention.
© Brands could maybe divert their advertising budgets to improving their products. Good stuff really gets my attention — and when I see a recommendation that seems to be heartfelt, I’ll take a lot of notice. It screws your copycat business? Oh dear — don’t care.
Elsewhere: Simon Collister reckons that Ad-Block Plus is simply complementing our natural abilities: “even before those devices existed we were blocking TV adverts by getting up to make a cup of tea or switching over to another channel”. Mark Evans — director of a blog network — says “If you believe in Web 2.0 and/or if you believe in the concept of free, Adblock is pure evil”. Nick Carr has forsaken the plug-in for the sake of seeing the web as it is, although he’s “pretty sure that Jesus would use Adblock Plus”. Kent Newsome agrees that better content and services are the answer, though perhaps not for bloggers: “Mechanics don’t have to give away their services, because they provide a service people will pay for”. Umair Haque agrees that advertising is simply not as valuable as the content it surrounds and thus fails: “Marketers, as we’ve pointed out before, have to figure out how to make ‘ads’ that benefit people”. Alan Patrick — in an unusually romantic moment — reckons sites that tone down the intrusiveness of their ads might enter into “some form of handshake arrangement” with readers.
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Personally, I think that it’s advertising that’s killing the web — especially all those spam weblogs and other refuse that are trying to cash in on Google’s Ad Sense and similar programs.
If you want to see a better future, look at thinks like Skype and Flickr. No ads. They keep their operating costs low by keeping their online service simple. They provide quality free services, attracting millions of users, to whom they sell a few value-added extras.
I was trying to think of a mechanism by which “reasonable” sites may signal to users that they will not get spammed/pop-upped etc etc, and thus the Ad-killer lets the ads through — sort of like security levels.
Romantic indeed :)
More venally, a small contribution to my paypal account every time I see an Ad on a page would be far more motivational :)
But you’re such a fanatical Facebook user Ian, surely you’d miss it?
I think this is a really interesting debate and one I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about recently. As someone who runs a service on the ‘Freemium’ model which is to say that we take a combination of advertising revenue AND paid subscriptions, this is quite close to my heart.
Personally, I agree that it’s naive for publishers to hope that the new Web2.0 user generation will all avoid adblockers for the sake of retaining the breadth of free services they currently enjoy. I would never expect that.
However, when you say “Good stuff really gets my attention”, I think there might be a little commercial naivety in that statement. Marketers exist to help good stuff get found. If it was as simple as ‘build it VERY WELL and they will come’ then many a great invention would not have found us. It isn’t always just good enough to build a great product and watch what happens.
My point is that advertising revenue is often the bridge that keeps the publisher’s business growing until it can reach a point where alternative revenue sources become more realistic and sustainable.
I believe the Internet would be a much narrower, less interesting, less useful and less informative resource without the plethora of tools and resources that depend on adblocking not becoming universally adopted.
The beauty of it all is that it’s a free market. If adblocker becomes a huge hit and everybody installs it, then advertisers won’t pay up and many web services will run out of cash. Fewer web services will mean fewer resources for the end user which they ultimately won’t like and some clever sole will come up with an alternative.
Didn’t an advertising-funded publisher pay your salary for a while Ian? :-)
Great points, David. And I’m guilty of a little bit of over-egging, I’m sure. Not to mention naivety.
However, I’m not entirely sold on this ‘advertising is a service to the consumer’ angle. That it’s helping me when I’m forced to look at ads, because otherwise I’d never find good new stuff. Putting aside the questions of freedom and choice, I do find new stuff all the time — through word of mouth and through serendipity. An economy that depended on advertising to learn about new things would be entirely in the hands of established players with the money to own the available keywords or banner slots. The money Sage throws at advertising is surely hurting your business, not helping it, David?
Also, I think this is also a bit of a storm in a teacup — the four million downloads — downloads, not users — of AdBlock are pretty trivial in the face of 1,173,109,925 internet users worldwide. And advertising spends online worldwide and especially in the West are not under threat by any means. They’re increasing very swiftly, particularly over the last 12 months. Any media owners whining about AdBlock should probably be looking elsewhere for the reasons their revenues aren’t soaring.
I agree that MOST advertising is of no value to the consumer of the advert. But I also believe that MOST consumers have benefited from SOME advertising — which is to say that most consumers have taken the decision to spend money as a result of ‘consuming’ the message in an advert at some time or other in their lives. It’s a numbers game and I would be very surprised if someone can claim to NEVER consciously or unconsciously benefiting from an advert.
I’m certainly not promoting an economy that depends on advertising but only suggesting that we are influenced positively and negatively by adverts to some degree.
There is no doubt that the best adverts are those that the consumer is pleased to see or hear and the publishers that achieve that kind of relevancy will succeed.
Interesting point about Sage. If you believe their ads are ‘annoying and intrusive and that they fundamentally don’t work’, why would they hurt my business?
Hehe — I don’t think it’s one or the other — IF advertising it was the only way to learn about new products, Sage would be able to control the small business software world and there’d be no innovation. Fortunately, there’s also other mechanisms. And so you’ll be OK!
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