David Emery OnlineBlocked
23 March 2010
There has been an surge of interest recently on the topic of ad-blocking, spurred on in part by this post on the popular tech-news site Ars Technica:
There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won’t hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis. If you have an ad blocker running, and you load 10 pages on the site, you consume resources from us (bandwidth being only one of them), but provide us with no revenue. […] My argument is simple: blocking ads can be devastating to the sites you love.
It makes for a very interesting read; an obviously passionate direct plea to their readership to help out, behave differently and make a difference.
As I was reading it I got a strong sense of deja vu; I’d heard this all before, somewhere else…
…replace ‘ad-blocker’ with ‘file sharing site’ and ‘content’ with ‘mp3’ and I think you might recognise it too.
I find it quite interesting that the march of ‘progress’ is of such a pace that a technology site can be threatened by the very kind of technology that it reports on – normally the internet is threatening offline media, not itself. Of course, in the article they do allude to the ‘broken business model’ comparison but it all strikes me as fairly pointless in exactly the same way the oft reported music industry pleas to ‘support the artist’ are pointless; the people who are the problem aren’t going to care.
Veering slightly off-topic – in as much as I’ve defined a topic so far – but on that note you may have seen that MGMT are streaming their new album on their website at the moment. So far, so normal – it’s pretty rare these days for an album not to be legally streaming somewhere upfront of it appearing in stores – but the reasoning of doing it – ‘the album has leaked’ seems pretty spurious.
Of course the album has leaked, but do you really want to tell people that on your website?
At the moment you go to whoismgmt.com, it lets you listen to the whole thing, tells you it’s available for free if you know where to look and doesn’t even tell you when it’s actually released.
I take it all back – maybe the recorded music industry is dying after all.
Ok, back to ad-blocking. Other then the continuing online-ification of media there’s a whole other reason why this is coming up now. It’s at this juncture that I’ll disclose that I do actually use a form of ad-blocker. I use the words ‘form of ad-blocker’ quite specifically though; what I actually use is a Flash blocker (ClickToFlash to be specific) which has the same knock-on effect: most ads – being flash based – are blocked.
We all know of course why Flash support is a hot topic right now (hint: begins with ‘i’ and ends with either ‘Pad’ or ‘Phone’). Online advertising has become increasingly Flash reliant which makes a lot of sense; it travels across platforms well (the aforementioned ‘i’ devices not withstanding) and offers a rich, animated (read: eye catching) environment which fits perfectly with the needs of advertisers.
However, I have a sneaking suspicion that no-one has really noticed the explosive rise in Flash blocking software. I have no doubt that practically everybody (again, excluding the ‘i’s) has Flash installed – everyone watches YouTube, right? – but delving into the stats of some of the larger sites I look after reveals that over 7% of visitors (on a sample of over 400,000 unique users) don’t have Flash installed. That’s about 25,000 people in this case (after taking out mobile users) that are using Flash blocking software.
So before getting het up about ad-blockers, it strikes me that coming up with a compelling alternative to flash-based ads might be a better plan of action.
HTML5 ads anyone?