I kind of wish the majority of people would use ad blockers. Ads are a pretty flawed business model, useful mostly because it's so easy. When you sell ads you're basically abusing your readership, pimping out their eyeballs to whomever happens to hand you a big wad of sweaty cash.
There are better ways to make money, ways that don't abuse users and instead provide them with value.
Edit: so much vitriol. I intentionally left out alternatives because there is no one size fits all model, but there are plenty of options. For example, consider changing from a model of "advertisers pay to rent the eyeballs coming to our site" to one where ads are a cooperative venture and most ads are essentially recommendations. Look for ways to make the link between someone reading your content and someone buying something a connection, instead of merely a random, uncorrelated activity. For artistic content sites, sell swag like t-shirts. Or consider selling byproducts and content collections such as physical and ebooks (for blogs, for example). If you run a site that provides a service ... consider charging money for that service. And of course look at crowd funding models if it's possible to divide up work into big project sized iterative chunks.
Or, hell, just offer people the ability to pay money to remove the ads. If you just stop thinking and stop caring after you started bringing in big ad revenue then you're doing a disservice to your readership.
Perhaps you should suggest a few? I'd love to see what you have in mind. This (monetizing online written content) isn't as trivial as you seem to imply.
> Look for ways to make the link between someone reading your content and someone buying something a connection, instead of merely a random, uncorrelated activity.
What do you think targeted advertising is?
> Or consider selling byproducts and content collections such as physical and ebooks (for blogs, for example).
Revenues from this sort of thing won't even cover operational costs for someone of Destructiod's size, let alone provide recurring revenue.
"Premium" services that just remove ads are generally a non-starter because...AdBlock does that for free. Subscriptions are awesome, but you have to find a way to implement a paywall where some content or value is withheld from free consumers, and that's a problem that has proved very difficult for content providers like Destructoid to solve on an internet where people expect to get their content for free.
The biggest problem with many of the "alternatives" is that they don't really work. They only really work for lone cowboys who only have themselves to feed.
1.) Recommendations don't work at scale. You are not going to find a single company to fund gaming journalism company in order to do tighter recommendations, and you aren't going to have enough man power to manage recommendations for multiple companies. Amazingly enough, there is a company called Google that provides a similar service to this, and I doubt destructoid can compete with them.
2.) Selling T-shirts is a terrible business model for a company that doesn't produce t-shirts. Again this works for the lone-cowboy, but for an actual company expecting to recuperate costs with t-shirts it would be simpler to just open a clothing line. Producing t-shirts isn't free and you once you have a sizable market its no longer easy. Now instead of hiring writers, you find yourself hiring sweatshops.
3.) Selling physical books only works for the lone cowboys (smbc, oatmeal). If you have to do it at scale, it would be smarter to just open a bookstore. And again, why should anyone buy an ebook when they could just use Readability for free?
4.) Charing for your service. This makes the most sense, NYT does it and is really successful. Problem is, it might only work for NYT. Its hard to convince gamers who in a large part don't buy their games, to pay for your service. Out of all the sites you ad-block, how many of them would you actually pay for? If Kotaku required a subscription for their service, would you actually pay for it?
Its easy to be an armchair MBA and claim ads are the problem and anything else would work without having tried it yourself, or list companies who are doing so successfully. Its just completely unfair to assume that the guys actually busting their butts trying to make it work are lazy because they use ads. If you really think these alternate models really work, you should start your company with them. With no competitors you are certain to eat the market.
Until then, please understand that online journalism, and print media in general, is really hurting to find a business model that actually works and they aren't using ads out of laziness. They are using ads to pay the bills.
I think that the subscription model is great, and there are places where I would be willing to pay if they moved in that direction. I pay $16 a month for a NYT subscription.
One issue is that some people seem to be even more offended by the subscription model than the advertising model.
OK, I hate replying to myself, but this is a pretty significant and contentious issue, so I think it's worth it.
Here are some example of folks who I think "do it right", or at least well, relative to the standard "slap ads on and forget about it" model:
Penny Arcade (a web comic, for those who don't know). Firstly, their ads have always gone through a rigorous selection process. Most ads are for games and the site owners demand that they play the games in the ads and they only pick ads for games they actually like a lot. Thus the ads serve as recommendations more than anything, they are not just hijacking your attention they represent actual value (the effort put into reviewing the games). Additionally, PA has a line of merch which includes not only t-shirts and posters but also collections of the comic strip organized by year in physical book form. Beyond that they also run a major gaming convention (Penny Arcade Expo / PAX) and have other projects (such as PATV). This provides diversified sources of income all founded ultimately on the fan base and enthusiasm for what PA does and is about. More so, last year PA launched a successful kickstarter to remove the main banner ad from the site and, as one of the stretch goals, to kick off a major content production (the web video reality-show called "strip search"). Now, not every web comic is going to be able to do all of these things but these are good examples of how you translate "what you're good at and what you do" into money.
A similar example would be "A List Apart", a web design blog. There are very few ads on their site and those that are there are highly relevant to the readership. More importantly, ALA sells books which include material that has already been on the site as well as new material, and they run the "An Event Apart" design conference.
37 Signals falls into a similar pattern. They sell collaboration, project management, and contact management services but they also have a well regarded blog. They sometimes package up material from the blog into book form, which they sell, and they have significant contributions to major open source software projects (such as Ruby on Rails). All of these things together help further their brand and drive business to their services and books. Their blog has a small number of highly relevant ads. Indeed, they helped found an ad company which serves well-vetted highly relevant ads to a cohort of web sites that are all generally focused around web design.
Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange. They have a small number of highly relevant ads (I detect a trend). Also, if you are a regular user of the site then you won't see the main banner ad on question pages when logged in. They also monetize through jobs boards, CV services (which provide a great synergy with use of a site and help show off your expertise directly), and amazon referrals.
GitHub and Dropbox have free service tiers but also charge money for their services, and GitHub has a job board.
There are a lot of broad trends here. The best ads are those that add value rather than try to hijack the user's attention, relevant ads that have had work put in to ensure they are relevant, and ads that are not intrusive. If your site is mostly content focused then finding ways of repackaging content and selling it directly can bring in plenty of income. As can finding ways to allow your fans to express their enthusiasm and trust for your content by buying things (merch) or attending events. And leveraging whatever it is users get out of your site through additional services.
If users are going out of their way to block your ads that's a signal, it means that they find the ads are providing negative value to them. And that's often the result of allowing ads to have negative value, by simply passing them off to folks who are willing to pay money for the possibility of infringing on your readers' attentions. Otherwise known as spam. Would you change your site to one where you required readers to give an email address and then you sold all of those addresses to spammers in order to make money? That's what many sites are effectively doing by being so indiscriminate about advertising.
If you're not thinking about how your site is making money and whether that method makes sense, is sustainable, and adds value to your readership then you're not thinking about it enough. You're taking your readers for granted.
I really want to hear the hypothetical ways in your mind; so far you have said nothing of value; just talking bad about current way of doing things instead of suggesting a way companies selling products could reach the market without using ads.
Are you getting paid by impressions or actual clicks?
If you are getting paid by impressions, I do feel a little bad for blocking your ads, but you have to understand that the reason I put up the adblock is a reaction to ad-abuse. I'm sick and tired of seeing ads scrolling up and down and across the page, interrupting your content. I'm sick and tired of pages taking 30 seconds to load because of ad-bloat, and I'm sick and tired of the generally bad experience that ads are bringing to me. Don't even get me started on pop-up ads or ads with music or talking.
If you are getting paid for actual clicks, then I don't feel bad at all. I never once, in all the years I have browsed the internet, clicked on an ad, so you aren't gaining anything from me anyways.
As an aside: I can't name a single ad that I have seen over the past week. Marketers thinking that ad-views are somehow equivalent in impact of billboards or TV ads are stuck in some dinosaur age of marketing and I ought to open up ads in pure spite.
The crux of the issue is that too many sites have abused its readership by thumping our heads with pointless and useless ads. The day I see you respect me is the day I'll respect you. This is no way implies that Destructoid is abusive, but unfortunately, you have been caught in the maelstrom. However, since I only click away the ads that irritate me, I find it odd that a site that I have never been to is apparently completely blocked as I see no ads. Choose your advertisers wisely and I may not even block (or notice) their ads.
> I can't name a single ad that I have seen over the past week
Ads aren't trying to get you to remember the ads, they're trying to get you to recognize, like, buy, etc the product. That can happen without remembering or actively paying attention to the ad.
I won't go on a hunt for a list of research confirming it, but there are about hundreds if not thousands of examples explaining that marketing does work, whether its audience thinks it does or not.
tl;dr Even if you believe you'll never click an ad, you're probably still hurting the advertiser and therefore the publisher.
The 'elephant in the room' of a question: what do you feel gives you the right to block ads? The content-creators establish the terms, and their deal is you get content in exchange for ad-viewership. If you're unwilling to view ads, don't partake in the exchange -- do not visit that site.
> This means that we're working twice as hard as other sites to sustain our company
This must be wrong. Surely if Destructoid are seeing a 50% block rate, their competitors must be seeing something similar too? A world with ad-blockers is the new normal for everyone.
Ad-blockers aren't going away. The fundamental architecture of the internet and the web makes it almost impossible to force people to view ads that they don't want to, and no advertiser is going to win the technological arms-race against the ad-blocking software. For now, at least, I have sufficient control over my own computer that I can dictate what appears on the screen.
I think the right conclusions are reached in this article though. Destructoid clearly understand the marketplace they're operating in, and a membership option of some kind is a good, non-exploitative way of earning money from content creation. It might not work, and there might be better alternatives, but someone is going to find a way that does work. The existence of ad blockers is providing "evolutionary" pressure toward business models that don't rely on spamming people with crap, and this is a good thing. (Assuming, that is, that the new business models aren't somehow worse, at which point we'll have to start blocking those...)
> it almost impossible to force people to view ads that they don't want to
It's trivial to do, technically. Just embed the ads with in-page (not externally linked) JS, or proxy 3rd party ad network requests through the hosting server, or splice them in on the server side, etc. I think we are going to see this widely adopted if the adblock rates continue climbing up.
This will obviously rub the adblock users the wrong way, but if you are generating the ad revenue from a lot of one-time visitors, it should be fine. Then, to not alienate repeated visitors, offer a paid, ad-free subscription. Perhaps of a freemium flavor. Done.
Now the question is why we don't see this being done at scale yet?
>This must be wrong. Surely if Destructoid are seeing a 50% block rate, their competitors must be seeing something similar too? A world with ad-blockers is the new normal for everyone.
Surely not. Depends on the target audience of each site. Direct competitors with the same target group maybe, but sites appealing to the general public or specialized non-techy publics surely not.
The article was unreadable due to ridiculous ads, a dumb mobile version and a read more.. link that reloaded the page only. So three suggestions:
1: focus on helping readers read content. Eliminate everything that gets in the way if that. (End user needs)
2: reduce the volume and spammiess of your ads, in all markets. (Quality of advertising reflects quality of site)
3: do a slashdot, and add a paid subscription that removes all advertising for a period. (Allow people to give you money).
3a: as an alternative offer a gold/pro version with greater benefits, not all which have to be that tangible.
Speaking as someone who runs a subscription site, there are a few key phrases to note in this article. I think the writer needs to face reality about ads vs paywalls.
I certainly wouldn't put up the sites you know today behind a paywall - Why not? Is there a law that says once free, always free? Slam it behind a paywall and you will lose 90% or more of your audience. But! You'll make money. That's the tradeoff.
My appeal read something to the effect that ad blockers primarily hurt our writers, and if you are reading our site, we'd like your support - Then ask for support the old fashioned way, by them giving you money in exchange for the service you provide.
one reader who, despite willingly denying our passive revenue, thought I was being too bold - Wrong. He's not willingly denying your passive revenue. He's installing an ad blocker to improve his browsing experience. You happen to be caught in that net. It's not like he got out of bed and said, "Hey, I'm going to screw Destructoid today"
Now, I'm not saying that paywalls are a solution to every problem. But I will say that appealing to people to disable ad blockers is not a solution to any problem. And blaming your users like this will never turn out well.
I apologize for my naivety here, but it would seem that the best (in the general sense, not simply financial one) way to make revenue would be to offer a desirable product, and price it accordingly.
The market would seem to suggest (as evidenced by the decline of once-decent rags like PC Gamer) that there is not a lot of demand for coverage of games if a cost is associated with it. Perhaps this is because anyone can blog about games and function as a journalist now, perhaps it is because demo discs are no longer relevant when downloads are available, perhaps it's because gamers are fickle feckless manchildren, perhaps it's a reptillian plot to take over America--regardless of the reason, it seems that trying to make a living off of games journalism is a Bad Idea.
I further question the decision to cheapen your site design and theming by allowing other elements into it that aren't under your control. If you are exercising any sort of integrity of product, it would seem obvious that letting somebody plaster garish random content on is a poor idea.
Don't get me wrong; artists since time out of mind have done payed work for patrons that would later become classic--but even a benevolent duke or aristocrat would be worked in an unobtrusive way into the greater piece (any art historians here are free to correct me) in such a fashion as to preserve the integrity of the work.
There's a tradeoff here though. On one hand you have friction, on the other hand you have revenue assurance, and often these are direct tradeoffs. Some types of content benefits from high revenue assurance and comparatively high friction, some content is really only useful if it's widely accessible with low friction though. And often the boost in total readership volume that comes from low friction can result in higher and faster growing revenues (web comics fall into this category, for example). However, in general I think content creators have become a bit lazy about considering the value they are offering to their readership.
Just because you put in a lot of effort into making something doesn't mean that what you make is worth anything. And just because it's possible to make money doing something doesn't mean that what you're doing is worthwhile either.
This might not be a popular sentiment, but if people are installing ad blockers, doesn't that mean they would rarely buy anything or be influenced by an ad? For me, I find some ads useful, such as Google Adsense so they're not a real nuisance for me. But if someone found them only intrusive, and not useful, if they didn't view the ad, that means MORE higher quality eyeballs.
So in a strange way, Destructoid is getting its FAIR share of ad revenue, since it's ONLY being shown to the people who find ads useful, and would buy something from an ad.
I understand it's not "fair" to be paid less for writing high quality content, but ad revenue is not welfare, and it's not a mandatory tip jar. Ad revenue is an exchange of value between advertisers and publishers, and if there's no value, then you shouldn't complain about not getting enough ad revenue.
Most ads are paid CPC, not CPM. So the advertiser doesn't pay until someone actually clicks the ad. And while it may be true that people who block ads would be less likely to click them, I doubt it's the case that they wouldn't click them at all.
Right, but from the point of view of the advertiser, the user would be "Buying something" - access to the contents of the article, which is in principle being paid for by the advertising. This is the model that is failing - and why so much effort seems to be put into (mainly on videos) preventing you accessing the content without viewing the ads.
As for directly paying, this doesn't seem to be an option - see, the whole twitter thing, and the fact that having a paywall effectively prevents developing new readers (unless you are large/well known enough to avoid this problem)
Destructoid is much more ad-heavy than other similar gaming news sites, and they tend to implement the ads in a way that hits browsers hard performance-wise, so that the site is just painful to navigate. I stopped going to Destructoid a while back for exactly this reason.
It seems that such heavy ad bombardment has been chasing their regular users to block ads. It only makes sense.
P.S. If there were an easy way for me to pay a nickel per article I read (or however much), instead of having ads all over the internet, I would jump at that in an instant.
I was visiting this article from an ipad, a device that can't have an ad blocker by design. I land on the page and start reading only to see the page disappearing and slowly being replaced by a slow and clumsy "mobile friendly" version of the site. Even so i persist in trying to read the article, except it got cut off after the opening paragraphs by a "read more" link, even though i had seen three ads so far. The read more link just refreshes the page, but doesn't reveal the rest of the article. To get to the content, i had to tap on three vertical bars hidden in the corner, and then choose the link to the desktop version. I assume that most people would have given up long before that.
So, here's my advice to destructoid: if you want ad impressions, try delivering your content on ipad in a way that's fast and readable, because on an ipad people don't block ads.
Maybe if you want your community to like you, don't use evil.js
> At first, it was about 10%, then 20-something. When I dared to blink it just increased faster. Over a few days it never got better, averaging at an ominous 42-46% block rate.
Why did it go up so fast? Maybe you used bad judgment and put up an ad that annoyed people?
You need to respect your users and treat them better before you get to complain.
I run ad block but i never tried to block the ads on Daring Fireball for example. Don't be one of the shady sites with crappy ads and evil.js
The reason I block ads has more to do with the latency of the ad networks than with the annoyance the ads cause me, which is minimal. I just got sick of some ad network hanging the page. I don't have that problem any more since I started blocking the ad networks in /etc/hosts.
They weren't doing annoying ads even before they did their crowdsource campaign to eliminate them for a year. I don't understand what overhead Destructoid has that requires them to have annoying ads.
From the article writer, replying to someone with a perfectly good point:
> May I ask why you use an ad-blocker on Destructoid?
This (not understanding what an adblocker is or how it works), and the apparent surprise at finding that 50% of (presumably technically literate) readers of their site block ads, seem to come across as incredibly naive. I agree that it can be a problem for these sites, but things like this make it sound like they inhabit another world from their apparent target readers.
<Ironically, I removed some linkspam that appeared when I copied that sentence>
Seems that monetizing content on the Internet is going to be an ongoing problem that doesn't have a really good solution.
I did click on the link, and whatever ads were on it were blocked by my adblocker. I think the writer may not understand that neither I nor anybody else specifically decided to block ads on Destructoid, a site that I had never heard of before today. We block all ads everywhere by default.
Most websurfers will regularly click to articles on sites they've never been to before, many of which are loaded with huge, bandwidth-sucking ads, often with loads of flash, javascript, pop-ups, pop-overs, etc, and sometimes even auto-downloading malware. I want to block all ads everywhere by default because I don't have the time to pay attention to the ad type and policy of every site that I'm only going to visit once, and I'd rather have the problem solved once and for all.
Paid subscriptions may be nice in a way, but they also seem to tear at the fabric of the internet. If all sites used them for most of their content, then most people would only read stuff posted at the 3-4 sites that they visited regularly and actually paid for, instead of surfing all over the place. How do you get new readers in that model?
It might help if there was some way to do micropayments per read - possibly with Bitcoin or something like that. Maybe some sort of big subscription network - like readers pay a subscription fee, and writers in the network get paid a small amount when a subscriber reads their article. I'm not sure what the long-term solution is, but I hope that it's one without ads.
I don't read Destructoid, but this sounded interesting. Upon entering the site, the whole browser window was overtaken by some ad selling me malware scanning. I can totally relate to the people blocking sites which don't police their advertisers.
He mentions in the article about how since he can't control his ad network to the extent that other major companies like Reddit does (they host their own I believe), he doesn't fall under the requirements of the AdBlock whitelist.
it's sad to see him take so much trouble with his ads when some other sites may be the reason.
you are just a side victim. no matter how polite your ads are, if someone else has lousy video/peel/survey ads, they will force users to block ads. and the ads will be blocked when those users visit your page.
most people have no idea they can whitelist sites. when they don't see an ad, they don't even know they are missing something.
heck, my way of blocking ads (etc/hosts file from someonewhocares.org) does even allow me to whiteliste stes. even if i wanted.
I opened up the article without ad blocking to see how polite the ads really were. I saw two of them, both in the sidebar (which is a good place for them). The first one was just a static image; I can live with that. The second had a big red blinking button on it, which naturally draws my eye away from the body text and drives me nuts.
These guys aren't as bad as some, but it looks like they're not just side victims.
I have so many plugins in my Firefox for blocking stuff, that I'm not sure how to whitelist anymore. The other day I wanted to whitelist sleepyti.me to see how he had placed the banner, and realized I couldn't.
I just want to say that while I don't personally block ads, I have used Flashblock, and I might consider blocking ads. The reason for this is not that they are "annoying" or get in the way of reading. For me, it's because I know that advertisements wear on you over time. They are whispers of culture and what you need to do to be happy and gain status. Because of how I feel about ads, I would consider paying for content. However, I think the real pain point here is that we have a hard time knowing whether the content we get is worth paying for, or whether we would have an easier time getting comparable content elsewhere for less. And, of course, how big is the market for people that say "I don't want to see ads because I want to save money on stuff I don't need... but I do want to spend money on certain content"?
So the author is trying very hard to please his audience, but he's also trying very hard to appeal to them and make money. Well, no kidding, we do need to make money to do what we're doing. But you have to make it clear that you are focused on making things better for your audience. You're demonstrably providing clear value of some sort to them. In this case, somehow reviewing games in a way that you enable your audience to make better decisions about where to spend their hard-earned dollars. (I can't speak to the magic that makes one game review site better than another.)
So ask your readers - have they used your content to make decisions? Have they saved money by not plopping down $59.99 on a game that they, individually, would not like? Do they agree with your reviews regularly? And is that because they try the same games that you review, and come to the same conclusions, or because they base all their conclusions on the reviews? If they are saving time and money and getting to do that which they value most (or a lot, at least, more than other things, in this case, playing particularly good video games), then you have clearly enriched their lives. They should let you know, and try to enrich your life, too. But I don't think that viewing ads enriches their lives or yours, or rather, it's a pretty indirect, watered down way to enrich your life.
The biggest problem with online ads is it's yet another sphere of influence which advertising is taking over and colonising with its discursive values (he said, idealistically). If I can click a magic button and have ONE place in my life with no ads, then why not make that the internet?
FWIW, I'm a semi-pro music journalist (try making money doing that these days), and I think online publishing is crying out for a non-intrusive way of monetizing that doesn't involve advertising.
Like most sites with ads, the moment you land on them, they sell you to one or more of their advertising partners. They don't ask your permission, or give you an option. The only way to deal with this is to use an ad blocker.
So the guy wants to make money selling ads? I want to make money watching the TV. I'm not going to write a blog post complaining that I can't make money by watching TV. I'm going to find something that people are happy to pay me for, and do that instead.
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|13 years ago|reply
There are better ways to make money, ways that don't abuse users and instead provide them with value.
Edit: so much vitriol. I intentionally left out alternatives because there is no one size fits all model, but there are plenty of options. For example, consider changing from a model of "advertisers pay to rent the eyeballs coming to our site" to one where ads are a cooperative venture and most ads are essentially recommendations. Look for ways to make the link between someone reading your content and someone buying something a connection, instead of merely a random, uncorrelated activity. For artistic content sites, sell swag like t-shirts. Or consider selling byproducts and content collections such as physical and ebooks (for blogs, for example). If you run a site that provides a service ... consider charging money for that service. And of course look at crowd funding models if it's possible to divide up work into big project sized iterative chunks.
Or, hell, just offer people the ability to pay money to remove the ads. If you just stop thinking and stop caring after you started bringing in big ad revenue then you're doing a disservice to your readership.
[+] [-] coldtea|13 years ago|reply
Compared to what?
>There are better ways to make money
Like? Asking for charity on Kickstart or Donations?
Because surely asking people to pay for casual web content is not one of them.
[+] [-] fredoliveira|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cheald|13 years ago|reply
What do you think targeted advertising is?
> Or consider selling byproducts and content collections such as physical and ebooks (for blogs, for example).
Revenues from this sort of thing won't even cover operational costs for someone of Destructiod's size, let alone provide recurring revenue.
"Premium" services that just remove ads are generally a non-starter because...AdBlock does that for free. Subscriptions are awesome, but you have to find a way to implement a paywall where some content or value is withheld from free consumers, and that's a problem that has proved very difficult for content providers like Destructoid to solve on an internet where people expect to get their content for free.
[+] [-] nemothekid|13 years ago|reply
1.) Recommendations don't work at scale. You are not going to find a single company to fund gaming journalism company in order to do tighter recommendations, and you aren't going to have enough man power to manage recommendations for multiple companies. Amazingly enough, there is a company called Google that provides a similar service to this, and I doubt destructoid can compete with them.
2.) Selling T-shirts is a terrible business model for a company that doesn't produce t-shirts. Again this works for the lone-cowboy, but for an actual company expecting to recuperate costs with t-shirts it would be simpler to just open a clothing line. Producing t-shirts isn't free and you once you have a sizable market its no longer easy. Now instead of hiring writers, you find yourself hiring sweatshops.
3.) Selling physical books only works for the lone cowboys (smbc, oatmeal). If you have to do it at scale, it would be smarter to just open a bookstore. And again, why should anyone buy an ebook when they could just use Readability for free?
4.) Charing for your service. This makes the most sense, NYT does it and is really successful. Problem is, it might only work for NYT. Its hard to convince gamers who in a large part don't buy their games, to pay for your service. Out of all the sites you ad-block, how many of them would you actually pay for? If Kotaku required a subscription for their service, would you actually pay for it?
Its easy to be an armchair MBA and claim ads are the problem and anything else would work without having tried it yourself, or list companies who are doing so successfully. Its just completely unfair to assume that the guys actually busting their butts trying to make it work are lazy because they use ads. If you really think these alternate models really work, you should start your company with them. With no competitors you are certain to eat the market.
Until then, please understand that online journalism, and print media in general, is really hurting to find a business model that actually works and they aren't using ads out of laziness. They are using ads to pay the bills.
[+] [-] scott_s|13 years ago|reply
One issue is that some people seem to be even more offended by the subscription model than the advertising model.
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|13 years ago|reply
Here are some example of folks who I think "do it right", or at least well, relative to the standard "slap ads on and forget about it" model:
Penny Arcade (a web comic, for those who don't know). Firstly, their ads have always gone through a rigorous selection process. Most ads are for games and the site owners demand that they play the games in the ads and they only pick ads for games they actually like a lot. Thus the ads serve as recommendations more than anything, they are not just hijacking your attention they represent actual value (the effort put into reviewing the games). Additionally, PA has a line of merch which includes not only t-shirts and posters but also collections of the comic strip organized by year in physical book form. Beyond that they also run a major gaming convention (Penny Arcade Expo / PAX) and have other projects (such as PATV). This provides diversified sources of income all founded ultimately on the fan base and enthusiasm for what PA does and is about. More so, last year PA launched a successful kickstarter to remove the main banner ad from the site and, as one of the stretch goals, to kick off a major content production (the web video reality-show called "strip search"). Now, not every web comic is going to be able to do all of these things but these are good examples of how you translate "what you're good at and what you do" into money.
A similar example would be "A List Apart", a web design blog. There are very few ads on their site and those that are there are highly relevant to the readership. More importantly, ALA sells books which include material that has already been on the site as well as new material, and they run the "An Event Apart" design conference.
37 Signals falls into a similar pattern. They sell collaboration, project management, and contact management services but they also have a well regarded blog. They sometimes package up material from the blog into book form, which they sell, and they have significant contributions to major open source software projects (such as Ruby on Rails). All of these things together help further their brand and drive business to their services and books. Their blog has a small number of highly relevant ads. Indeed, they helped found an ad company which serves well-vetted highly relevant ads to a cohort of web sites that are all generally focused around web design.
Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange. They have a small number of highly relevant ads (I detect a trend). Also, if you are a regular user of the site then you won't see the main banner ad on question pages when logged in. They also monetize through jobs boards, CV services (which provide a great synergy with use of a site and help show off your expertise directly), and amazon referrals.
GitHub and Dropbox have free service tiers but also charge money for their services, and GitHub has a job board.
There are a lot of broad trends here. The best ads are those that add value rather than try to hijack the user's attention, relevant ads that have had work put in to ensure they are relevant, and ads that are not intrusive. If your site is mostly content focused then finding ways of repackaging content and selling it directly can bring in plenty of income. As can finding ways to allow your fans to express their enthusiasm and trust for your content by buying things (merch) or attending events. And leveraging whatever it is users get out of your site through additional services.
If users are going out of their way to block your ads that's a signal, it means that they find the ads are providing negative value to them. And that's often the result of allowing ads to have negative value, by simply passing them off to folks who are willing to pay money for the possibility of infringing on your readers' attentions. Otherwise known as spam. Would you change your site to one where you required readers to give an email address and then you sold all of those addresses to spammers in order to make money? That's what many sites are effectively doing by being so indiscriminate about advertising.
If you're not thinking about how your site is making money and whether that method makes sense, is sustainable, and adds value to your readership then you're not thinking about it enough. You're taking your readers for granted.
[+] [-] OGinparadise|13 years ago|reply
The world's biggest advertiser has made the use of adblockers necessary, if you want to use their engine http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/1... or http://www.seobook.com/images/google-serp-layout.gif and not see just ads. Once activated for a site that has abused ads, others are hurt almost by default.
[+] [-] jQueryIsAwesome|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dizzystar|13 years ago|reply
If you are getting paid by impressions, I do feel a little bad for blocking your ads, but you have to understand that the reason I put up the adblock is a reaction to ad-abuse. I'm sick and tired of seeing ads scrolling up and down and across the page, interrupting your content. I'm sick and tired of pages taking 30 seconds to load because of ad-bloat, and I'm sick and tired of the generally bad experience that ads are bringing to me. Don't even get me started on pop-up ads or ads with music or talking.
If you are getting paid for actual clicks, then I don't feel bad at all. I never once, in all the years I have browsed the internet, clicked on an ad, so you aren't gaining anything from me anyways.
As an aside: I can't name a single ad that I have seen over the past week. Marketers thinking that ad-views are somehow equivalent in impact of billboards or TV ads are stuck in some dinosaur age of marketing and I ought to open up ads in pure spite.
The crux of the issue is that too many sites have abused its readership by thumping our heads with pointless and useless ads. The day I see you respect me is the day I'll respect you. This is no way implies that Destructoid is abusive, but unfortunately, you have been caught in the maelstrom. However, since I only click away the ads that irritate me, I find it odd that a site that I have never been to is apparently completely blocked as I see no ads. Choose your advertisers wisely and I may not even block (or notice) their ads.
[+] [-] evansolomon|13 years ago|reply
Ads aren't trying to get you to remember the ads, they're trying to get you to recognize, like, buy, etc the product. That can happen without remembering or actively paying attention to the ad.
I won't go on a hunt for a list of research confirming it, but there are about hundreds if not thousands of examples explaining that marketing does work, whether its audience thinks it does or not.
tl;dr Even if you believe you'll never click an ad, you're probably still hurting the advertiser and therefore the publisher.
[+] [-] clicks|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjknight|13 years ago|reply
This must be wrong. Surely if Destructoid are seeing a 50% block rate, their competitors must be seeing something similar too? A world with ad-blockers is the new normal for everyone.
Ad-blockers aren't going away. The fundamental architecture of the internet and the web makes it almost impossible to force people to view ads that they don't want to, and no advertiser is going to win the technological arms-race against the ad-blocking software. For now, at least, I have sufficient control over my own computer that I can dictate what appears on the screen.
I think the right conclusions are reached in this article though. Destructoid clearly understand the marketplace they're operating in, and a membership option of some kind is a good, non-exploitative way of earning money from content creation. It might not work, and there might be better alternatives, but someone is going to find a way that does work. The existence of ad blockers is providing "evolutionary" pressure toward business models that don't rely on spamming people with crap, and this is a good thing. (Assuming, that is, that the new business models aren't somehow worse, at which point we'll have to start blocking those...)
[+] [-] abcd_f|13 years ago|reply
It's trivial to do, technically. Just embed the ads with in-page (not externally linked) JS, or proxy 3rd party ad network requests through the hosting server, or splice them in on the server side, etc. I think we are going to see this widely adopted if the adblock rates continue climbing up.
This will obviously rub the adblock users the wrong way, but if you are generating the ad revenue from a lot of one-time visitors, it should be fine. Then, to not alienate repeated visitors, offer a paid, ad-free subscription. Perhaps of a freemium flavor. Done.
Now the question is why we don't see this being done at scale yet?
[+] [-] coldtea|13 years ago|reply
Surely not. Depends on the target audience of each site. Direct competitors with the same target group maybe, but sites appealing to the general public or specialized non-techy publics surely not.
[+] [-] waxjar|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lancewiggs|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MicahWedemeyer|13 years ago|reply
I certainly wouldn't put up the sites you know today behind a paywall - Why not? Is there a law that says once free, always free? Slam it behind a paywall and you will lose 90% or more of your audience. But! You'll make money. That's the tradeoff.
My appeal read something to the effect that ad blockers primarily hurt our writers, and if you are reading our site, we'd like your support - Then ask for support the old fashioned way, by them giving you money in exchange for the service you provide.
one reader who, despite willingly denying our passive revenue, thought I was being too bold - Wrong. He's not willingly denying your passive revenue. He's installing an ad blocker to improve his browsing experience. You happen to be caught in that net. It's not like he got out of bed and said, "Hey, I'm going to screw Destructoid today"
Now, I'm not saying that paywalls are a solution to every problem. But I will say that appealing to people to disable ad blockers is not a solution to any problem. And blaming your users like this will never turn out well.
[+] [-] angersock|13 years ago|reply
The market would seem to suggest (as evidenced by the decline of once-decent rags like PC Gamer) that there is not a lot of demand for coverage of games if a cost is associated with it. Perhaps this is because anyone can blog about games and function as a journalist now, perhaps it is because demo discs are no longer relevant when downloads are available, perhaps it's because gamers are fickle feckless manchildren, perhaps it's a reptillian plot to take over America--regardless of the reason, it seems that trying to make a living off of games journalism is a Bad Idea.
I further question the decision to cheapen your site design and theming by allowing other elements into it that aren't under your control. If you are exercising any sort of integrity of product, it would seem obvious that letting somebody plaster garish random content on is a poor idea.
Don't get me wrong; artists since time out of mind have done payed work for patrons that would later become classic--but even a benevolent duke or aristocrat would be worked in an unobtrusive way into the greater piece (any art historians here are free to correct me) in such a fashion as to preserve the integrity of the work.
(the perhaps best writeup I've seen of games journalism was over at Triforce: http://www.thetriforce.com/?p=813 )
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|13 years ago|reply
Just because you put in a lot of effort into making something doesn't mean that what you make is worth anything. And just because it's possible to make money doing something doesn't mean that what you're doing is worthwhile either.
[+] [-] AznHisoka|13 years ago|reply
So in a strange way, Destructoid is getting its FAIR share of ad revenue, since it's ONLY being shown to the people who find ads useful, and would buy something from an ad.
I understand it's not "fair" to be paid less for writing high quality content, but ad revenue is not welfare, and it's not a mandatory tip jar. Ad revenue is an exchange of value between advertisers and publishers, and if there's no value, then you shouldn't complain about not getting enough ad revenue.
[+] [-] eurleif|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] misnome|13 years ago|reply
As for directly paying, this doesn't seem to be an option - see, the whole twitter thing, and the fact that having a paywall effectively prevents developing new readers (unless you are large/well known enough to avoid this problem)
[+] [-] jblow|13 years ago|reply
It seems that such heavy ad bombardment has been chasing their regular users to block ads. It only makes sense.
[+] [-] jblow|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Joeri|13 years ago|reply
So, here's my advice to destructoid: if you want ad impressions, try delivering your content on ipad in a way that's fast and readable, because on an ipad people don't block ads.
[+] [-] AdrianRossouw|13 years ago|reply
I thought of something, might the growth of mobile ad revenue be offset by the lack of ad blockers on the platforms?
[+] [-] xenophanes|13 years ago|reply
No it doesn't, they have to deal with ad block too.
> Read more at http://www.destructoid.com/half-of-destructoid-s-readers-blo...
Maybe if you want your community to like you, don't use evil.js
> At first, it was about 10%, then 20-something. When I dared to blink it just increased faster. Over a few days it never got better, averaging at an ominous 42-46% block rate.
Why did it go up so fast? Maybe you used bad judgment and put up an ad that annoyed people?
You need to respect your users and treat them better before you get to complain.
I run ad block but i never tried to block the ads on Daring Fireball for example. Don't be one of the shady sites with crappy ads and evil.js
[+] [-] glesica|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chaostheory|13 years ago|reply
They weren't doing annoying ads even before they did their crowdsource campaign to eliminate them for a year. I don't understand what overhead Destructoid has that requires them to have annoying ads.
[+] [-] dspeyer|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] misnome|13 years ago|reply
> May I ask why you use an ad-blocker on Destructoid?
This (not understanding what an adblocker is or how it works), and the apparent surprise at finding that 50% of (presumably technically literate) readers of their site block ads, seem to come across as incredibly naive. I agree that it can be a problem for these sites, but things like this make it sound like they inhabit another world from their apparent target readers.
<Ironically, I removed some linkspam that appeared when I copied that sentence>
[+] [-] ufmace|13 years ago|reply
I did click on the link, and whatever ads were on it were blocked by my adblocker. I think the writer may not understand that neither I nor anybody else specifically decided to block ads on Destructoid, a site that I had never heard of before today. We block all ads everywhere by default.
Most websurfers will regularly click to articles on sites they've never been to before, many of which are loaded with huge, bandwidth-sucking ads, often with loads of flash, javascript, pop-ups, pop-overs, etc, and sometimes even auto-downloading malware. I want to block all ads everywhere by default because I don't have the time to pay attention to the ad type and policy of every site that I'm only going to visit once, and I'd rather have the problem solved once and for all.
Paid subscriptions may be nice in a way, but they also seem to tear at the fabric of the internet. If all sites used them for most of their content, then most people would only read stuff posted at the 3-4 sites that they visited regularly and actually paid for, instead of surfing all over the place. How do you get new readers in that model?
It might help if there was some way to do micropayments per read - possibly with Bitcoin or something like that. Maybe some sort of big subscription network - like readers pay a subscription fee, and writers in the network get paid a small amount when a subscriber reads their article. I'm not sure what the long-term solution is, but I hope that it's one without ads.
[+] [-] nwh|13 years ago|reply
[0]: http://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads
[+] [-] jmz|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HaloZero|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gcb0|13 years ago|reply
you are just a side victim. no matter how polite your ads are, if someone else has lousy video/peel/survey ads, they will force users to block ads. and the ads will be blocked when those users visit your page.
most people have no idea they can whitelist sites. when they don't see an ad, they don't even know they are missing something.
heck, my way of blocking ads (etc/hosts file from someonewhocares.org) does even allow me to whiteliste stes. even if i wanted.
[+] [-] pjscott|13 years ago|reply
These guys aren't as bad as some, but it looks like they're not just side victims.
[+] [-] throwawayG9|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neogodless|13 years ago|reply
So the author is trying very hard to please his audience, but he's also trying very hard to appeal to them and make money. Well, no kidding, we do need to make money to do what we're doing. But you have to make it clear that you are focused on making things better for your audience. You're demonstrably providing clear value of some sort to them. In this case, somehow reviewing games in a way that you enable your audience to make better decisions about where to spend their hard-earned dollars. (I can't speak to the magic that makes one game review site better than another.)
So ask your readers - have they used your content to make decisions? Have they saved money by not plopping down $59.99 on a game that they, individually, would not like? Do they agree with your reviews regularly? And is that because they try the same games that you review, and come to the same conclusions, or because they base all their conclusions on the reviews? If they are saving time and money and getting to do that which they value most (or a lot, at least, more than other things, in this case, playing particularly good video games), then you have clearly enriched their lives. They should let you know, and try to enrich your life, too. But I don't think that viewing ads enriches their lives or yours, or rather, it's a pretty indirect, watered down way to enrich your life.
[+] [-] hipsters_unite|13 years ago|reply
FWIW, I'm a semi-pro music journalist (try making money doing that these days), and I think online publishing is crying out for a non-intrusive way of monetizing that doesn't involve advertising.
[+] [-] mike-cardwell|13 years ago|reply
So the guy wants to make money selling ads? I want to make money watching the TV. I'm not going to write a blog post complaining that I can't make money by watching TV. I'm going to find something that people are happy to pay me for, and do that instead.