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by monkmartinez 3778 days ago
That is quite the paradox, isn't it...

If they lose significant eyeballs, they can't charge a premium for the ad space. With less premium, they make less money. With less money, they can't write the articles.

At least with ad block and non-adblock eyeballs, they could say we get "XXX"k traffic per day/month/year. Less traffic overall will be bad in the long run.

4 comments

Not to mention they lose all the viral follow-on effects. If Jane never reads another article of theirs, then Jane never shares another article of theirs, and never refers a new reader or subscriber, and on goes the cascade multiplied by however many people stop reading. They end up cutting off their own oxygen.

The people commenting here that Wired doesn't need to care about ad-blocking readers, are entirely ignoring this critical element. It's a big component of how new people get introduced to Wired.

I hope you did not think that the advertisers aren't capable of running a little estimation program on all those clicks going 'in' to wired that did not result in the displaying of an ad tag?

If there is any party that is aware of how many people on wired's web property are running an ad blocker it is the advertising networks.

Wired is not telling them that they get 'XXX'k traffic per time unit, they're being told what their traffic is and what percentage of them has an ad blocker installed.

I hope the advertisers realize that we have not even come close to hitting a critical mass of people that install adblockers in the first place. I am amazed by how many people don't run adblockers. I tell everyone I know to run them... Remember it is only 1 out of 5 right now... It will be much higher as the tech illiterate are taught how to install them.

The truth is, I can always just go outside. Go for a run, Go for a hike with my kids... collect some rocks, smash rocks looking for geodes, play catch, play hide and go-seek, cook, drink. All will be much better than me sitting on my computer reading articles on Wired.com

No, they cannot say that they have xxx users per day/month/year, the reports of the adservers are the one that are read by the advertisers (and the editors), the number of visitors is useless if you can't serve them ads.
Advertisers don't care (or measure, really) non-ad-viewing users when deciding where to run these campaigns. So you're already not counted.