[Sir_Substance]

>First of all, adblock has destroyed a significant number of small bloggers, content-writers, and other publishers, as especially those were struggling to stay above water.

People used to do that for free because they cared about the content they were writing, rather than because it was making their daily bread.

I distinctly remember the quality of writing during this time being much higher than it is today.

[noxToken]

You pretty much hit the nail on the head.

Written content was either managed by major news outlets or by hobbyists. I can still remember reading many blogs in 2009/2010 by hobbyist who just wanted to spread their experience with the hobby or craft. Most had no advertising. Those that did had the small, occasional unobtrusive banner ad. All of the links to follow were to other blogs by those who proved to the writer that their blogs were topical and without cruft.

Then the paid blogging boom took off. People realized they could churn out crap most of the time with the occasional heavy hitter[0]. Keep readers coming back to a mediocre blog plastered in ads for a minimal amount of effort and get paid.

Note: This isn't a shot at Atwood. I'm agreeing with him.

[0]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/how-to-achieve-ultimate-blog-s...

[mahranch]

> I can still remember reading many blogs in 2009/2010 by hobbyist who just wanted to spread their experience with the hobby or craft. Most had no advertising. Those that did had the small, occasional unobtrusive banner ad. All of the links to follow were to other blogs by those who proved to the writer that their blogs were topical and without cruft.

You make it sound like every hobby website wasn't out to make money. What you're describing are the exceptions, not the rule. And they weren't as numerous as your comment indicates. An RC airplane website/forum had ads or deals with companies selling planes, marijuana websites (anyone remember overgrow.com back in 2001?) had deals with seedbanks and marijuana supply companies. Very rare was the hobby website that operated without sponsorship or some form of money generation mechanic. Not to mention, hosting back then was much more expensive. Today it's cheaper than dirt but that wasn't always the case.

[noxToken]

I was speaking strictly about blog sites not forums. Frost is the New Black[0] is one such site that's cruft free and about the hobby. Granted, it's now defunct, but it's an example of what I mean. Big Bear Butt[1] is another.

Sites like the one you mention have always existed. I was part of a major video content forum back in the mid 00s, and even we had the flashy ads with a circle of affiliates like Shoosh, Kill Some Time, etc. I'm not so naive to think that the '09 web was a place without obtrusive ads and small, optimized web pages.

[0]: https://frostisthenewblack.wordpress.com/ [1]: https://thebigbearbutt.com/

[freehunter]

Yeah, I run three blogs that I started within the last two years and none of them have ads. None of them make money. It costs me $15/mo for hosting and $30/yr for domain name registration for all three combined, so it's not like I'm going bankrupt if I don't make money from my blog. I just like writing, and I get pretty excited when I get 50 views a day on one of them.

Run your adblocker, I don't care. It's not blocking anything on my site. I get "paid" (infrequently) in non-monetary ways, like when I'm given a coupon to a restaurant in exchange for writing an article about them. Your ad blocker won't do a thing to stop that, and on the plus side, that coupon won't infect your PC with malware.

[RodericDay]

I was toying with the idea of making it required to have some kind of ad-block enabled for people to read my blog.

Just some hand-crafted full page splash with a generic class name that would get caught by the most primitive ad-blockers.

[ManlyBread]

I concur, in my opinion people writing with money in mind usually optimize towards reaching the largest amount of people possible while people who don't focus on the idea itself.

[ksk]

>People used to do that for free because they cared about the content they were writing, rather than because it was making their daily bread.

Those two points are not necessarily connected. People can and do, do a good job at things even if they're just doing it for the money.

>I distinctly remember the quality of writing during this time being much higher than it is today.

What writing are you thinking about? Personally, I can't think of anything that was better.

[Sir_Substance]

>People can and do, do a good job at things even if they're just doing it for the money.

In order to make the big dolla dolla on ads, your piece can't be too confronting, it can't be so dense or specific that's it's unapproachable for a general audience and it can't critique the people who supply your ads. It probably needs to use simple enough words and sentences that it translates through google with reasonable accuracy. It must have a sufficiently eyecatching title and meet a minimum of entertainment value for the average netizen.

Most importantly, it must cater to the facebook, twitter and/or reddit communities well enough to trend on at least one, and thus must meet the community standards that prevent those communities or their moderators from quashing it.

In short: content that is effective at generating ad revenue must be shallow, vapid and limited in scope.

These days, my best source of written content on the internet comes either from company blogs and pages, which notably do not survive on ad revenue since they have a real business model paying their hosting bills, or from community/project specific blogs and pages, which are generally donation supported.

[ksk]

>content that is effective at generating ad revenue must be shallow, vapid and limited in scope.

Even if I grant you all the generalizations you made, You will still not make any revenue unless your audience is interested in content that is shallow, vapid and limited in scope.

[Sir_Substance]

>You will still not make any revenue unless your audience is interested in content that is shallow, vapid and limited in scope.

That's total garbage. Correct game theory when making monetized content for profit is to have it spread as widely as possible. Whether it's good quality or even factually correct is vastly less important than that it be spread widely, quickly.

The goal is not to get people to read the content, it's to park a piece of advertising in front of their face that they are willing to click on. The job of deciding which advertising they will click on is dealt with by the content network. The authors job is to get eyeballs on a page they can affix ads to. Vapidness is great, because it's cheap and non threatening, and to demonstrate this principal, I present to you buzzfeed, vice and wired:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/ http://www.vice.com/en_se http://www.wired.com/

(I don't even need to take static shots of them, they'll be covered in shallow garbage any time of day or night)

[ksk]

You have a curious way to call my point "garbage" and then proceed to agree with me. You must have parsed it in some odd manner.

[Sir_Substance]

I guess I thought you were saying that if an audience wasn't into that sort of thing, the site that originally attracted them wouldn't want to alienate them by dropping the quality pieces. But it doesn't really matter what a sites audience is interested in, if the site is hopping on the ad train they'll want to move to shallow and vapid as rapidly as possible. Certainly that's what happened to wired (and time).

[white-flame]

Furthermore, it used to be much more expensive to host content "back in the day", while today you can do it everywhere for almost or actually free.

With revenue being far less required today to keep a blog up than it used to be, denigrating the effects of ad blocking on the "little guy" makes even less sense.