:: worlds in words ::

So you might have heard about an article that Ars Technica ran, titled Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love.  You might also have read the reply to this post on Brian Carper’s blog, Advertising is devastating to my well-being.  I actually found out about this here on John Gruber’s blog (Daring Fireball), which I follow through RSS – I don’t read Ars Technica or Brian Carper’s blog.

The basic gist is very simple, as if you couldn’t tell from the article names – Ars Technica argues that viewers on their site should not be turning off adblockers; Carper calls this stance “repugnant”; and Gruber states that he doesn’t know what the easy answer is, but links to an article on Rob Sayre’s Mozilla Blog, Why Ad Blockers Work.

I know, I know.  I just tossed up four different links, and some of ‘em are textwalls.  Basically, I think that Ars’ article is full of shit.  I find their argument irrational and many parts of it specious at best.  They do mention at the beginning of their article that they’re not saying that adblocking is theft, immoral, or unethical.  But then they spend the rest of their thousand-word article trying to convince people that:

If you read a site and care about its well being, then you should not block ads (or you subscribe [link removed] to sites like Ars that offer ads-free versions of the site). If a site has advertising you don’t agree with, don’t go there. I think it is far better to vote with page views than to show up and consume resources without giving anything in return.

As Carper says in the comments section of his blog post, “A ‘should’ is an ethical statement in my mind.”  To me, Ars is saying that it is right and proper that users not be running adblockers when on their site, and that if you are, it is not a Good Thing ™.  Oh, I should probably note here that I run AdBlock – and that I hate using a browser without it.  AdBlock is the one sliver of sanity that renders the web into relevance for me.  Without it, I’m awash in a sea of advertising garbage.

I also don’t agree with the concept of not going to a site if I disagree with their advertising.  In fact, I think it speaks stronger to the site if they get the pageviews, but not the advertising revenue – i.e., people still want the content, but they despise the ads.  After all, Content is King, right?  There are countless sites where I want to view the content, but the ads bug the hell out of me.  Honestly, it drives me insane because the articles – or whatever it is I’m on a site for – are great, but the ads are distracting and actually detract from my experience of the site.

In my opinion, Ars took the issue way off the deep end.  Telling the readers that people get fired because people have adblockers on, that because revenue margins decrease, people look into more ‘questionable’ forms of advertisement to recoup on losses, and blaming this on the readerbase – that’s a shitty thing to do.  We the readers are not to blame for this.  Not for the most part.

The top three reasons for blocking ads seems to be:

1. They are disrupting the web experience, and/or degrading the site content material;
2. Ads also perform tracking, generally by putting cookies on your computer, which people wish to avoid; and
3. Some ads, such as ones that are done in Flash, eat up system resources.

I think that all three of these are legitimate reasons to use an adblocker.   And I think even if the reason is completely malicious – the reader wants to consume the site’s content without allowing the site to make any advertising revenue off of him – there is nothing technically wrong with this.  Adblocking is not illegal, immoral, or unethical.  It is a tool, and regardless of what the intention is, the end result is the same.

I don’t think that Carper has a right to say the things he says, either.  Okay, no, he has the right to say them, they’re just… way far off on the other extreme.  Yes, there are ads everywhere.  I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with sites choosing to deploy ads as a form of revenue instead of going purely the subscriber route.  For a site like Ars Technica, you can choose to pay and subscribe to view it without advertising, and I think that’s a good model.  To say that ads are making the world a “garish and hideous place to live” is an overstatement of the nth degree.  But he does say something I agree with:

If you want to force me to look at your ads, make me sign a contract or consent to an agreement before you display your site to me. Otherwise I owe you nothing. If your business is about to go bankrupt, and your business is so important to me that I want it to stick around, I’ll give you money. Real money. I’ve done it before.

And that’s just the thing.  You can put ads on your site, but you can’t force me to load them, look at them, click on them, or anything else along those lines.  I say this because Ars, according to their article, tried for twelve hours to make their site such that if the ads weren’t loading, the content wouldn’t either.  Basically, if you’re not making them money one way or another (ads or subscription), you weren’t gonna get any of the content.

What the bald-faced bullshit fuck is this?

I mean, if that’s what they want to do, then all the power to them.  But don’t act surprised when people retaliate in reaction.  That’s a douchebag move that really shows that they don’t understand the advertising or marketing side of things at all.  That’s the kind of move you make out of sheer desperation when you’re sinking hard (and already sunk well into a bottle of whiskey).

And while others showed up to support our actions, there was a healthy mob of people criticizing us for daring to take any kind of action against those who would deny us revenue even though they knew they were doing so.

Gee, why would that be, Ars?  Your whole article is half-begging and half-angry ranting for people to stop adblocking on your site so that you can make extra cashmonies.  You’re a business, you’re in it to make money, I get that.  You’re not there to throw your content into the wilderness of the Internet for free, and it’s not free for you to host your site or to generate and publish your content.  But act like a petulant thirteen-year-old, and you’re gonna lose a lot more of that revenue.  Seriously.  I already know I’m never going to your site now.

I, like Carper, run all my sites and services without advertisement.  Advertising on my sites would be a joke, anyway – I’d make maybe enough to break even on hosting and bandwidth costs, and that’s if I’m lucky.  So I don’t pretend that this is out of some altruistic ideal (Carper claims he doesn’t run ads because he’d rather take a loss than force people to look at ads), although I do host a handful of my friends’ sites and servers on mine at no cost.  But again, that’s small stuff for the most part that isn’t taking up much space, bandwidth, or processor/memory overhead.

I once purchased an advertising space on a forum (one that had thousands of daily user logins) for a couple months.  It was just a small badge, probably about 150 x 150, and I paid by the month instead of by views or clickthroughs.  When I went to see if it was working properly, I noticed that it wasn’t showing up for me – ironically, it was getting blocked by AdBlock because of the file-structure of where the graphic was on the server.

I contacted the administrator and pointed this out to him, and had a nice friendly chat with him in Google Chat as we both sat in our Gmails, trying to figure out why it was showing up for him but not for me.  At last, I figured out that it was AdBlock, and explained to him how we could get it – and the other couple graphics that were being blocked – to show up to those who were running adblockers.

He consulted with his staff and then returned to me with their decision.  They would not be using my method of circumventing it – they would be doing the exact opposite, they would make sure that the other ads that were showing up for me would also be blocked by the software.  I was stunned stupid for a moment as that sank in.  His words still stick with me: “We don’t want to override user preference.”   If they’re running AdBlock, they don’t want to see ads, so we’ll make sure they don’t show up.  That’s what he was telling me.

Granted, as I mentioned, I paid by the month, not by views or clicks.  So the site got the same amount of money either way, whether or not anyone was seeing my ad.  For me, being the advertiser in this scenario, I obviously wanted my little 150 x 150 graphic to reach every single person who came onto the site.  But I understood the administrator’s reasoning, and agreed with it (yes, he’d actually given me a choice and asked if their decision was all right with me).

Just like there’s nothing people can really do to stop piracy or illegal downloading, there’s not really much that people can do about adblockers.  The difference is, ad blocking is legal.  So I’d advise sites (and the publishers, the designers, and everyone else involved) to stop spending so much effort trying to get around adblockers and focus more on relevant, integrated advertising.  And that is pretty much what I believe Sayre’s trying to convey in his article.

Until then, AdBlock stays on for me.