
Adblockers: The Way Out - colinprince
http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/09/27/adblockers-the-only-way-out/
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omginternets
Either I'm missing something or a large group of tech/business writers are
missing something. It seems to me that:

\- Nobody wants paywalls

\- Nobody wants adds

The problem from a business perspective is that adblockers will forever be
more cost-effective than paying each site to remove adds.

Further compounding the problem is the web's equivalent of "clean coal": _non-
intrusive advertisement_. As hinted in the article, "non-intrusive" contents
quickly becomes intrusive when bandwidth and screen real-estate become scarce,
so mobile users have even more reason to block ads and not pay for content.

This isn't without precedent. In the US, cable television was initially
marketed in much the same way that pay-sites are today: no ads. It took only a
few years before ads began to creep in, and cable TV is now as unwatchable as
over-the-air broadcast. This in turn spurred the DVR movement, chiefly because
of ad removal. It's an order of magnitude easier to block incoming content on
a computer than to filter ads out of a television broadcast, which is why the
ad/blocker development cycle is much shorter in IT, and why ad blockers always
seem to have the upper hand.

On the internet, there's no shortage of content creators, so IMHO, the only
way to approach online advertising is as follows. Either:

\- Don't serve ads

\- Create ads I want to consume

Am I missing something?

