Off the Beat: Bruce Byfield's Blog

After reading Ken Fisher's "Why Ad Blocking is Devastating the Sites You Love," I admit to mixed emotions. In fact, I wonder if I can possibly navigate the issue without revealing myself as hopelessly hypocritical.

Fisher is writing after Ars Technica, for which he works, blocked content from ad blockers for twelve hours. Technically, the experiment was a success, but it met with mixed reactions.

"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," Fischer writes. "Others rightly criticized the lack of a warning or notification as to what was going on."

Moreover, he adds, "We made the mistake of assuming that everyone who is blocking ads at Ars is doing so with malice. As it turns out, only a few people are, and many (most?) indicated you are happy to help out." To help gain more support, Fischer explains the economics of ads and their necessity for online sites.

What he does not say, but could have, is that this necessity is greater than ever in many cases, because the price of ads slumped during last year's recession, and in many cases has not recovered yet.

Mixed emotions

Being reminded of the economic truths that Fischer spells out leaves me conflicted. On the one hand, much of my writing is published online. The sites on free and open source software (FOSS) that publish me derive at least part of their income from ads. That means that I am paid partly by those ads. Therefore, cold calculation tells me that I should support online ads by every means possible.

Equally, you could say that FOSS itself -- or at least the aspects to which I make my most frequent contributions -- are directly supported by FOSS. By not viewing the ads, I am also letting FOSS down.

On the other hand, I hate ads. I'm the sort of person who refuses to wear name brand clothing. I remove or cover labels if possible. I watch DVDs rather than live television because I find commercials jarring and distasteful. The only reason I don't scream obscenities at telemarketers is that hanging up wastes less time. I won't even use the free note pads that local real estate agents keep jamming into the mail box. My credo is that if someone wants me to advertise for them, they can pay me -- and it had better be a good price, too if I'm going to look like a mindless consumer.

Of course, I'm not entirely consistent. To avoid serious leg injuries, I have to endure some bizarre combination of stripes on my running shoes. I have also written and designed ads, although only for products and people I believe in. Even so, a nagging voice in the back of my mind keeps telling me that, if I do too much of this kind of compromise, the bad karma will have me spending my next hundred incarnations as a cockroach.

Stumbling towards a resolution

With this attitude, my first instinct is to become an active user of Ad Blocker, Ad Block Plus, or whatever other extension might be available. After all, it's not like I've clicked an online ad more than once or twice a year anyway.

It's also interesting how much cleaner many sites are when you don't see their ads. The extreme case is a site belonging to a local blogger who boasts of making forty thousand a month through ads. Viewed through an ad blocker, his front page is reduced to a couple of paragraphs of text and maybe two or three ads that have eluded my filters.

The trouble is, as Fisher points out, online ads are not paid for by click-throughs, but by views. In other words, if I don't see the ads, the sites don't earn money, and I'm not supporting them. Since those interested in FOSS are often both idealistic and technical, that means that a significant proportion of a FOSS sites' readers are probably depriving it of income.

So what's the solution? I could just turn off ad blocking and cultivate my blindness to marketing. I already have developed this tendency in print -- so much so that I have trouble finding an ad even when someone tells me that it might interest me. After a couple of pages, I simply don't see an ad, except to identify it for what it is and quickly move on. In much the same way, if a radio or TV is playing in the background while something more interesting is happening, I have a hard time focusing on them even when I want to.

Thanks to pop-up ads and other techniques, this blindness is harder to develop online. Increasingly, ads thrust themselves under your attention by interfering with your reading. Still, it could be done, in much the same way that I immediately identify and discard the spam that bypasses my email filters. And, once the blindness is fully developed, everyone would win: I don't have to read the ads, and the sites still get paid because I am technically viewing. I'm simply not reading, that's all.

Yet even this solution feels like a cheat. It means that advertisers are not really getting what they pay for, and I am escaping through a moral loophole.

What I would really like to see is an alternative funding model evolve, as Matt Asay suggests. If a less obnoxious revenue stream than ads could emerge, then the mixed feelings I am describing might disappear.

However, I have no idea what that alternative might be, or how to work towards it (Nor does Asay, apparently -- just a faith that one might exist). Given that I am not about to read every ad I encounter with sympathy and interest, my ambiguous position towards online ads seems likely to stay unresolved.

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