4 ms·

As a regular user of ad-block, I am 100% in support of this model. It's a bit more work (and I expect third-party delivery server-side to be a thing) but ethica

As a regular user of ad-block, I am 100% in support of this model. It's a bit more work (and I expect third-party delivery server-side to be a thing) but ethically it makes a lot more sense. I think it's much harder to stand by a marketing company's invasive tracking code when your own domain has to serve it. More directly though, I find organic advertising (sponsorships, author recommendations and reviews, etc) to just be more effective when the site can pull them off correctly. Kotaku's deals section, for example, is consistently lovely and makes it right through my ad blocker. I'll even click it on purpose from time to time, because I value their curation and it's usually all stuff that most gamers would be interested in anyway. I don't think all advertising is bad, but the third-party iframe "drop it on the page and forget" nonsense has got to go.

naravara 8y ago
Daring Fireball does a great job of integrating ads into the page. Gruber sells a small banner in the corner, which is basically the only part of his page with any color in it so it really stand out. Then he has a weekly sponsor post where he plugs that week's sponsors. He also has an individual sponsor for his RSS feed where he puts an article plugging them into the RSS feed. Granted, that only works because he has an established enough audience that he can have sponsors come a-courting. But that's the difference between building an audience and trawling for traffic. Josh Marshall runs Talking Points Memo largely on subscriptions, with ad revenue as a supplement. He wrote an entire article about how he prefers to keep his day-to-day expenses for the year paid through reliable funding streams like subscriptions and using more variable sources, like ad revenue, to support investments for future growth, capital investment, etc. I think he prefers to not feel over-a-barrel to advertisers or traffic as well, just out of a sense of journalistic integrity.

naravara 8y ago

Daring Fireball does a great job of integrating ads into the page. Gruber sells a small banner in the corner, which is basically the only part of his page with any color in it so it really stand out. Then he has a weekly sponsor post where he plugs that week's sponsors. He also has an individual sponsor for his RSS feed where he puts an article plugging them into the RSS feed. Granted, that only works because he has an established enough audience that he can have sponsors come a-courting. But that's the difference between building an audience and trawling for traffic. Josh Marshall runs Talking Points Memo largely on subscriptions, with ad revenue as a supplement. He wrote an entire article about how he prefers to keep his day-to-day expenses for the year paid through reliable funding streams like subscriptions and using more variable sources, like ad revenue, to support investments for future growth, capital investment, etc. I think he prefers to not feel over-a-barrel to advertisers or traffic as well, just out of a sense of journalistic integrity.