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> This means that we're working twice as hard as other sites to sustain our company This must be wrong. Surely if Destructoid are seeing a 50% block rate, the

> This means that we're working twice as hard as other sites to sustain our company This must be wrong. Surely if Destructoid are seeing a 50% block rate, their competitors must be seeing something similar too? A world with ad-blockers is the new normal for everyone. Ad-blockers aren't going away. The fundamental architecture of the internet and the web makes it almost impossible to force people to view ads that they don't want to, and no advertiser is going to win the technological arms-race against the ad-blocking software. For now, at least, I have sufficient control over my own computer that I can dictate what appears on the screen. I think the right conclusions are reached in this article though. Destructoid clearly understand the marketplace they're operating in, and a membership option of some kind is a good, non-exploitative way of earning money from content creation. It might not work, and there might be better alternatives, but someone is going to find a way that does work. The existence of ad blockers is providing "evolutionary" pressure toward business models that don't rely on spamming people with crap, and this is a good thing. (Assuming, that is, that the new business models aren't somehow worse, at which point we'll have to start blocking those...)

coldtea 14y ago
>This must be wrong. Surely if Destructoid are seeing a 50% block rate, their competitors must be seeing something similar too? A world with ad-blockers is the new normal for everyone. Surely not. Depends on the target audience of each site. Direct competitors with the same target group maybe, but sites appealing to the general public or specialized non-techy publics surely not.
- rjknight 14y ago
  I would have assumed that competitor sites were the most relevant comparison to draw. It is highly likely that Destructoid sees a higher rate of ad-blocking than, say, yahoo.com, but that's not really relevant as Destructoid isn't competing with Yahoo!.
  - AdrianRossouw 14y ago
    it's even likely that they see higher rates of ad blocking than IGN, because they are a bit more niche among gaming blogs.
  - coldtea 14y ago
    Maybe, but the point remains. While having having X readers PLUS the infrastructure costs to support X readers, they see the same revenue as more general sites having X/2 readers. If there weren't ad-blockers, the absolute reader count would be the only thing that mattered. As it was in the press era. It didn't matter if you were the New York Times or the LISP Quarterly, if you had managed to have X readers you got the same amount of ad money (well, not 100% the same, because it also depended on the demographic, but LISP and NYT would rank close enough).
abcd_f 14y ago
> it almost impossible to force people to view ads that they don't want to It's trivial to do, technically. Just embed the ads with in-page (not externally linked) JS, or proxy 3rd party ad network requests through the hosting server, or splice them in on the server side, etc. I think we are going to see this widely adopted if the adblock rates continue climbing up. This will obviously rub the adblock users the wrong way, but if you are generating the ad revenue from a lot of one-time visitors, it should be fine. Then, to not alienate repeated visitors, offer a paid, ad-free subscription. Perhaps of a freemium flavor. Done. Now the question is why we don't see this being done at scale yet?
- ubernostrum 14y ago
  You seem to be assuming that the only way to block ads is a blacklist of domains that JS won't be loaded from.
- Tuna-Fish 14y ago
  That doesn't really help. A simple crowdsourced "see an ad? highlight it and it goes away" system would work against that. Adds have content, and that content can be used to find and block them, even if their source is the same as the page content.
  - lenazegher 14y ago
    Yes, that could happen, but it almost certainly wouldn't. The general problem with ad blockers is that they are a set-and-forget scorched-earth solution to the problem of annoying ads. As a web publisher, it doesn't matter if you carefully tweak your ads to be as unobtrusive and relevant to the user as possible, because users running ad blockers won't see them to begin with. Asking users to whitelist your site is a non-starter. If you use some fairly trivial tactics to prevent your ads being blocked by the default settings of the ad blocker, the vast majority of users with an ad blocker will never bother to set up some custom filter to block your specific ads because the default settings are the program for 95% of people. If you have some really obnoxious ads then yes, perhaps more people will go to the bother of blocking them. But if you don't, I assert that almost no-one will bother. If you're facebook, the people who maintain blocklists for popular ad-blockers will write some custom rules for your new ads. But most sites aren't facebook.
waxjar 14y ago
As long as ads are in the markup, they can be blocked. It might take a hand-crafted CSS selector, but that's nothing impossible.

coldtea 14y ago

>This must be wrong. Surely if Destructoid are seeing a 50% block rate, their competitors must be seeing something similar too? A world with ad-blockers is the new normal for everyone. Surely not. Depends on the target audience of each site. Direct competitors with the same target group maybe, but sites appealing to the general public or specialized non-techy publics surely not.

rjknight 14y ago
I would have assumed that competitor sites were the most relevant comparison to draw. It is highly likely that Destructoid sees a higher rate of ad-blocking than, say, yahoo.com, but that's not really relevant as Destructoid isn't competing with Yahoo!.
- AdrianRossouw 14y ago
  it's even likely that they see higher rates of ad blocking than IGN, because they are a bit more niche among gaming blogs.
- coldtea 14y ago
  Maybe, but the point remains. While having having X readers PLUS the infrastructure costs to support X readers, they see the same revenue as more general sites having X/2 readers. If there weren't ad-blockers, the absolute reader count would be the only thing that mattered. As it was in the press era. It didn't matter if you were the New York Times or the LISP Quarterly, if you had managed to have X readers you got the same amount of ad money (well, not 100% the same, because it also depended on the demographic, but LISP and NYT would rank close enough).

abcd_f 14y ago

> it almost impossible to force people to view ads that they don't want to It's trivial to do, technically. Just embed the ads with in-page (not externally linked) JS, or proxy 3rd party ad network requests through the hosting server, or splice them in on the server side, etc. I think we are going to see this widely adopted if the adblock rates continue climbing up. This will obviously rub the adblock users the wrong way, but if you are generating the ad revenue from a lot of one-time visitors, it should be fine. Then, to not alienate repeated visitors, offer a paid, ad-free subscription. Perhaps of a freemium flavor. Done. Now the question is why we don't see this being done at scale yet?

ubernostrum 14y ago
You seem to be assuming that the only way to block ads is a blacklist of domains that JS won't be loaded from.
Tuna-Fish 14y ago
That doesn't really help. A simple crowdsourced "see an ad? highlight it and it goes away" system would work against that. Adds have content, and that content can be used to find and block them, even if their source is the same as the page content.
- lenazegher 14y ago
  Yes, that could happen, but it almost certainly wouldn't. The general problem with ad blockers is that they are a set-and-forget scorched-earth solution to the problem of annoying ads. As a web publisher, it doesn't matter if you carefully tweak your ads to be as unobtrusive and relevant to the user as possible, because users running ad blockers won't see them to begin with. Asking users to whitelist your site is a non-starter. If you use some fairly trivial tactics to prevent your ads being blocked by the default settings of the ad blocker, the vast majority of users with an ad blocker will never bother to set up some custom filter to block your specific ads because the default settings are the program for 95% of people. If you have some really obnoxious ads then yes, perhaps more people will go to the bother of blocking them. But if you don't, I assert that almost no-one will bother. If you're facebook, the people who maintain blocklists for popular ad-blockers will write some custom rules for your new ads. But most sites aren't facebook.

waxjar 14y ago

As long as ads are in the markup, they can be blocked. It might take a hand-crafted CSS selector, but that's nothing impossible.