[seanblanchfield]

I used to block ads before we noticed that 30% of our website revenue was lost to adblocking. We realised that people weren't intentionally blocking ads on our site, but probably due to some bad advertising that pushed them over the edge somewhere else on the internet. There was nothing we could do, so started a new business (PageFair).

In your post, you are correctly angry at advertisers. But adblocking doesn't punish advertisers, it punishes websites, starting with your favorite ones. Right now, the advertisers just go somewhere else for their traffic. Even if it did somehow punish advertisers, would it discriminate between the relevant & polite ones (e.g., job ads on stackoverflow) and the spammy ones (magic weight loss pills on dictionary.com)?

Agree that the publishers and web users need something better. That's our goal at PageFair.

[coldpie]

Good luck to you, but it never works. As you say, there's no way to discriminate between relevant & polite ads and spammy ads except for human intervention. I'm not involved in the business (clearly), but I think the overheads are sufficiently small in the advertising business that that's just not viable.

That's why I don't think advertising is a viable business model for web content in the long term. Spammers are going to spam, users are going to install adblocking software to get rid of the spam, and whatever's left will either get caught up in adblock or be too cost ineffective for businesses to bother with.

[coldpie]

Replying to myself to ask Sean a direct question. Your ads appear to be really crap quality. "Free Mp4 Player" with a link to Ask.com is really your idea of better advertising?

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8021255

[Ricapar]

> I used to block ads before we noticed that 30% of our website revenue was lost to adblocking.

I'm curious how you came at that number.

I'm inclined to believe that at least some of the population that does click on and interact with advertising is part of a very different group than that would install AdBlock.

I find myself in the latter - I run AdBlock, but even if I didn't, I wouldn't be clicking on ads anyways. Am I part of that 30% lost revenue?

[CmonDev]

I think I have never-ever bought something via a banner. I will always read several comparison reviews first. SO ads don't get blocked in my browser for some reason, but the quality of their job ads is very low (e.g. no salary info in 99% cases) and it only works well for open-source-high-rep type of developers anyway. So basically just a timewaster for both me and an ad-provider. Hence block all-around :).