Publishers are upset about ad blockers. Forbes did a study and found that 20% of the people visiting their site were running ad blockers, for example. In response they have now instituted a technical fix: If you are running an ad blocker, they now no longer allow you into their site.
The problem is that they’ve overlooked exactly why people are running these ad blockers. Hint: In the past twelve months, Forbes has served viruses to their web site viewers multiple times via the ad networks that have bought space on their pages. And that’s not counting the poor quality ads that generated pop-ups that redirected you to a porn site, or the ads which loaded extensive Flash content that caused the page to run extremely slowly and use excessive resources, or the privacy issues caused by ad networks that do not respect “Do Not Track” browser requests.
The reality is that people don’t install ad blockers because they want to deprive their favorite publishers of the income needed to stay in business. They are installing ad blockers because publishers have sold their souls to Satan — or, rather, to advertising networks that serve poor quality ads — for thirty pieces of silver.
Technical fixes aren’t going to fix this. A swift Google search finds a technical solution to get around Forbe’s technical solution of blocking people who visit with ad blockers enabled, and I have tested this and it works (and AdBlock finds 11 advertisements on the sample page I visit, thus proving that Forbe’s insistence that their web site is “advertising-light” is nonsense). All technical fixes do is instigate a technological arms race where the ad industry and ad blocking industry leapfrog each other.
Yet the only solutions offered by the advertising industry are, to put it bluntly, the purest of bull excrement. They refuse to admit they have a problem, and refuse to do anything about it. At some point something has to be done, because the entire business model of advertiser-supported content cannot continue if ads aren’t visible on web site. But one thing advertising networks and the publishers they’re bullying with threats of “block the ad blockers or we won’t sell ads on your site” cannot do is technologically innovate their way out of this problem, because it’s not a technological problem — it’s a problem with low quality advertising networks, one that is only going to get worse as publishers continue selling space on their web sites to scumbags who would sell their own mother for a dollar. Either publishers need to take back their advertising from the pond scum and kick them off their sites (even if it requires creating their own advertising network to replace the current ones that increasingly sell scammy/virus laden content), or they will go out of business as the advertising death spiral goes into hyperdrive. Which will happen? I don’t know. I just report what is. What happens depends on whether publishers and the online industry return to the reality the rest of us live in, rather than some bizarro world reality where people install ad blockers for no reason at all. Thus far I’m seeing no such indications, but … (shrug).
– Badtux the Technology Penguin
Companies that won’t change will go out of business. But others with updated business models will come along and that their place. Change or die, it’s their choice.
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Jerry, it would not be the first industry that refused to change and committed collective suicide.
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