

Why Ad Blockers Work - sayrer
http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2010/03/06/why-ad-blockers-work/

======
jdietrich
I've said this before on HN - what we online call 'advertising', print media
call 'remnant advertising'. The space that gets sold through third parties is
the crap that your own sales team just couldn't manage to sell. Most print
publishers would be horrified at how little attention is paid by web
publishers to selling advertising. All print magazines have in-house ad sales
teams because they can get higher prices and attract higher quality
advertising. They understand their own niche and can establish ongoing
relationships with advertisers. Advertising online is just done incredibly
poorly relative to real advertising.

~~~
patio11
_Advertising online is just done incredibly poorly relative to real
advertising._

Advertising online is threatening to offline advertising professionals and
publishers, but these two statements are not co-extant. The reason Google is
taking over the world is that when Big Brand Advertiser's outsourced
advertising firm gets slick-talked into spending six figures on a single page
advertisement in Vogue, nobody has a bleeping clue whether that particular
advertisement actually advanced business goals or not. Spend six figures on
AdWords driving folks to your landing page, though, and you can track the ROI
fairly accurately.

~~~
sayrer
(I wrote the linked post)

This comment indicates you didn't RTFA. The entire point of it was to suggest
that high traffic content sites would benefit from a way to move their own
ads, but stay "above the line" and be accountable for results.

Basically, when Rupert Murdoch flips out about Google, he is on to something.
He says that his product is being commoditized by its compliment. His reaction
is to charge for consumers for content, and cut off air supply. My thought is
that these sites should run their own ad sales, since that is where they
actually generate cash. A core competency, one would hope.

Another comment here says that would generate a bunch of costs from non-
standard deals. It needn't be so. There are already standard ad sizes. A
middle man isn't required for standard terms.

------
petercooper
Except if you follow this guy's suggestion, you now need your own sales team
to sell ads for your site rather than relying on Google's/Doubleclick's/etc.
And to pay for that sales team? You need to sell more and higher paying ads..
:-)

People outsource their ad sales to Google, Doubleclick and similar providers
not because they can't rig up systems to audit and provide metrics, but
because they can't actually sell the ad space themselves.. (it's the
"outsource what you suck at" thing)

~~~
el_dot
You can outsource what you suck at, but its a bad idea to outsource to someone
who sucks at it as well.

I think what the post was getting at was that most people buy fashion
magazines for the ads, because the ads are well crafted and made by the best
photographers in the field. Some of them are pretty damn close to art. The ads
are actually part of the magazine and not just a money-maker. You'd think this
type of integration would be easier on the web, but no most sites would rather
just throw a banner on the sidebar, another on top of the navigation and call
it a day.

~~~
somedaywings
Pandora does a pretty good job of integrating ads into their site. Youtube had
some nice ads (one for Wario game) that were disguised as regular videos, but
ended up taking over the whole page. And CollegeHumor has done some similar
things.

I think new media sites are getting better at this. And if the iPad (and the
webapp-style magazines it was created for) ever takes off I think we'll see
this sort of thing more.

------
mrkurt
We (Ars) have run our own ad servers in the past. The unfortunate truth is
that our own URLs will end up in the various live ad block lists within about
36 hours. People are going to block our ads (deliberately or just because
their block list does) either way, despite what they might say about not
liking DoubleClick or Flash or wanting text ads or any of the other technical
"solutions" they clamor for.

To date, running that post was by far the best thing we've done to counteract
ad blockers. We saw a measurable bump in our pageview to ad served ratio, and
we sold a ton of subscriptions.

------
Klondike
Wow. This is a model article. It takes two controversial opposing articles
about an extremely relevant problem, points to a grey area that's worked in
the past, and then, quite insightfully, points out a missing link (self-hosted
advertising that is still inherently auditable to third parties) that we
should fill in.

Even though I detest advertising, I think a lot of what I detest about them
could be seriously mitigated by turning advertising into something a business
plans and designs for. Let's get some applicants to Y Combinator next season
that try to figure this out.

~~~
mrkurt
Unfortunately, it's not really a missing link. :) First, it's not that easy to
run the entire ad server stack for every advertiser. Many want their own
DoubleClick tags in regardless of what setup you have, since they're running
campaigns on multiple sites and want to track them in the same place. We call
these third party ad tags and they cause no end of technical problems, but
it's not going to change anytime soon.

Secondly, running your own ad server really just guarantees that your specific
ads will end up blocked by the vast majority of people running ad blockers.
There is an entire Easylist ruleset specifically for site hosted ads:
[https://hg.adblockplus.org/easylist/file/8811cd8afb56/easyli...](https://hg.adblockplus.org/easylist/file/8811cd8afb56/easylist_specific_block.txt)

The _only_ unblockable way of showing ads to people is by selling sponsored
content. It's shady as hell, but many sites do it.

This is why we ran our little experiment to hide content for people using
AdBlock Plus on Friday night. We wanted to see how many people noticed (a lot)
and we wanted to know how quickly Easylist was updated (about 8 hours).

------
ig1
Editorial control of ads has nothing to do with the technical serving
mechanism.

Self-hosting ads doesn't mean the site pays more attention to the choice of
ads, any more than using a third party ad-system means that a site doesn't pay
attention to the choice of ads.

If sites self-served ads, people would develop ad blockers that blocked them.
Just because third-party ad server filtering is the standard way ad-blocking
works now, we shouldn't make the mistake of thinking the third-party ad
servers are the reason people block ads.

And of course once you break down the barrier between content and ads you have
a much more serious risk of conflict of interest. Major TV stations, magazines
and newspapers will often avoid news articles that are disparaging of their
major advertisers, something that doesn't occur when there's a complete
separation of ad sales and content provision.

------
Tichy
I used to actually like the ads when I went to the cinema. Not anymore. They
have just become offensive - often there is over an hour of ads, even though I
paid for a ticket. And the ads are stupid. So I consent with the post.

Also, I suspect ads work better if people actually like them.

~~~
jules
> often there is over an hour of ads

Uhm, what?! When I go to the cinema there is maybe 5 minutes of ads, then 5-10
minutes of new movie trailers, then the movie starts. And you can come in
after the ads & trailers if you want (but not many people do this).

I don't understand why people go to the cinema if they have to watch an HOUR
of ads, especially because you can buy the DVD and watch ad-free. The cinemas
should have an option to pay $x to skip ads.

~~~
Retric
Most DVD's include some forced advertising.

Anyway, I still go to the movies a lot. If you show up early to get a good
seat you end up watching generic advertising while getting popcorn etc, then
in the theater before showtime you get the same generic advertising. Then, at
the stated movie start or a little after you get 7-10 minutes of higher
quantity advertising, then 5 to 15 minutes of movie previews then the movie.

So, if you show up early enough and you really can watch a full hour of
advertising before the movie starts. However, if you don't mind sacrificing a
good seat or just go at an off time you can avoid most if not all of that.

~~~
nitrogen
The solution to this is reserved seating theaters. There are a couple in my
area, so my friends and I will reserve seats online a few days before and show
up right when the movie "starts."

~~~
ido
I had no idea this was not standard, I have never seen a free-sitting cinema.

When you buy a ticket here the cashier asks you where you want to sit.

~~~
robryan
The opposite here, very few cinemas have reserved seating, certainly though
this would present a reason to buy your ticket in advance online for a popular
new movie.

------
samd
I think the solution to this problem is sponsorships. If there were a network
that connected sponsors to websites it would be easy for a site to find a few
good sponsors and just mention them in posts bypassing the ad-blockers and
getting readers attention. It works in podcasting, why can't it work on blogs?

~~~
mrkurt
Because we want writers to have as little knowledge of ad campaigns as
possible. We cover relatively negative news about the vast majority of
companies that advertise on Ars. Breaking that firewall leads to bad things.
Often very bad things.

It's hard enough when companies try and bully us by restricting access since
they're not really happy with our coverage. At least then we're not implicitly
encouraging authors to mind their tongues. :)

~~~
samd
The sponsors could be unrelated to the topics covered. People who read tech
news still drink soda and drive cars.

