
The effect of ad blocking on website traffic and quality - mbroshi
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1111/1756-2171.12218/abstract
======
briga
Is it wrong that I don't particularly care about supporting the ad-based web?
Ads don't interest me, and I don't particularly feel like making space for ads
in my daily attention span and thereby degrading the quality of my web-viewing
experience so big corporations can profit. The whole reason I switched from
watching TV to using the internet as my primary source of entertainment was to
escape advertising. I have a website and as long as it's up I am not going to
put ads on it. I feel like information just wants to be free. I'd be
interested to hear some alternate perspectives on this however.

~~~
rootusrootus
The flip side is that any reasonably popular site on the web is going to cost
a not insignificant amount of money to maintain, and the hard reality is that
nobody really wants to pay for it out of pocket. They want it for free, paid
for with ads that other people see while they block them with their browser
plugin.

I've said for a long time that I'd rather see something that functioned much
like Facebook does (or did, rather, maybe 10 years ago) but was completely
supported by subscription. Let me pay something like $5/month and in return no
funny business, no stupid manipulation to get more page views, etc. Just a
place I can interact with friends and family.

But nobody would pay for that, even if that's basically what they pay for it
indirectly through the products they buy.

~~~
Terretta
On the contrary, it costs almost nil to handle traffic with an HTML/CSS static
site, maybe 3x - 10x that with personalization, transactions, social, etc.
Most info sites don’t need those.

Define popular? How about a billion hits?

Figure four servers for static HTML/CSS, maybe add CloudFront or similar if
heavy on images or progressive download video, and 10 servers for dynamic
personalization/transactions, for a billion personalized/e-commerce hits a
month.

A billion hits averages to under 400 reqs/second, which you could handle on a
single Pentium running Apache on BSD in late 90’s. Make it a bell curve,
account for surges, 4 modern boxes is still comfy headroom for static stuff.

If hosting content is prohibitively expensive you could be doing it wrong. Try
not firing up script interpreters and ‘frameworks’ per hit, use a static site
gen CMS. If dynamic, spend time nailing caching.

~~~
graeme
I think you interpreted maintain too literally. For most sites you need to
paid writers, designers, programmers, etc

Those all cost money.

~~~
Terretta
GP had own site, said ‘information wants to be free’, I was talking about case
where that gets popular.

I was not talking about media generated as placeholders for ads (sports,
‘news’, and reality television come to mind, as does click-bait).

~~~
graeme
Ah, fair enough

------
beloch
If you're a user reading this kind of article or paper, you should not feel
guilty for using an ad-blocker. You are simply protecting yourself. The people
who should stand up and take notice are website admins and ad providers.

The web's ad industry is nothing short of amazing. A small number of users
started using ad blocking software when ads became obnoxious and intrusive,
flashing, spinning, spawning popups and obscuring the content they're supposed
to accompany. Did the ad industry take a hint? No, they moved, en masse, to
ads that were _more_ obnoxious and intrusive. Then they started exploiting
browsers to discover as much personal information as possible about users,
which motivated even more people to install ad blockers. Then ads became one
of the most significant vectors of malware, so people started adopting script
and ad-blockers as standard safe-computing practice.

It's reached the point where I _would not allow_ either my parents or my
children to run a browser without an ad-blocker installed. That's how bad it's
gotten.

Ad providers have had years to establish ways of delivering safe, privacy-
respecting, non-intrusive, content-specific advertising. They haven't, and the
rising use of ad blocking is the natural consequence. The demand from people
running websites _should_ be there. Maybe space devoted to an ethical ad
provider would make less money in the short-term, but anyone can see that
ignoring the rise of ad-blocking is going to hurt their bottom line down the
road.

Ads _just work_ in print media. They don't jump out of the corner of the page
and cover up articles while flashing and making loud noises. They don't invade
your privacy. They don't damage your property. Online ads need to advance to
this state. The onus is on ad providers and those employing them to accomplish
this, not on users to uninstall their ad blockers.

------
newscracker
Ok, I'm not going to rent this full article or buy it just so I can comment on
it. The abstract is more than enough for that purpose.

> "Ad blocking software allows Internet users to obtain information without
> generating ad revenue for site owners, potentially undermining investments
> in content."

Good that it uses the correct words, like "potentially". I wish we could have
something that talks about the user experience, by saying something like,
"Most of the sites that run ads are usually obnoxious, drain mobile device
batteries and data quotas, track and profile users, spread malware, mine
cryptocurrency using the user's resources and are potentially a threat to the
entire web and humanity as a whole!"

> "We explore the impact of site-level ad blocker usage on website quality, as
> inferred from traffic. We find that each additional percentage point of site
> visitors blocking ads reduces its traffic by 0.67% over 35 months. Impacted
> sites provide less content over time, providing corroboration for the
> mechanism. Effects on revenue are compounded; ad blocking reduces visits,
> and remaining visitors blocking ads do not generate revenue."

I'm confident that the reduced visits are only because of ad-block killers on
the websites and the generally poor quality of content on the sites (most
"news" sites today regurgitate something from another site with little or no
value addition to the context). Such sites don't deserve to be supported by
users unless they provide a lot more value.

> "We conclude that ad blocking poses a threat to the ad-supported web."

The ad-supported web is a threat to the web itself. So this is actually good
in some ways. Yes, we don't have viable, accessible and cheaper mechanisms for
people to support all the sites directly (without involving crooked and
malicious ad networks). But the publishers who don't care much for their users
don't deserve to be supported. Period.

------
dredmorbius
"There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for
keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should
allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-
four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New
York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to
vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race
for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the
scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the
property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

An anonymous New York journalist, quoted in Hamilton Holt's _Commercialism and
Journalism_ , 1909.

[https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/2...](https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/2/mode/2up)

~~~
8bitsrule
IRL that would be John Swinton!
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Swinton_(journalist)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Swinton_\(journalist\)))

~~~
dredmorbius
Thank you!

Holt didn't attribute the quote, and I'd not attempted to track it down.

------
yjftsjthsd-h
> We find that each additional percentage point of site visitors blocking ads
> reduces its traffic by 0.67% over 35 months. Impacted sites provide less
> content over time, providing corroboration for the mechanism.

Unless they provide some mechanism by which adblockers cause people to stop
visiting, they've reversed cause and effect. Bad sites get worse and lose
users.

~~~
arkades
You quoted the mechanism. The reduction in ads causes a reduction in content
(because one pays for the other.)

~~~
mrguyorama
Alternatively, it could be that the website owner has "bought" low quality
content that can't keep an audience, and is just looking to throw blame

------
fao_
Until people can verify that the adverts I expose my computer to do not
contain cryptocoin miners, crapware, or outright malware, and until adverts
become less intrusive generally and much faster at loading, I will continue to
use an ad-blocker. The advertising industry created this problem, it has the
choice of fixing it as well. Through regulation, whitelists, blacklists, etc.

I value the security of my computer and the amount of mental space I have been
gifted with too much to clutter them with bit-crap and visual-crap. Besides,
advertising has become an adversarial and manipulative industry. The more
unwanted influence I can cut out the better.

------
corysama
I have been opposed to ad blocking until recently because I do want to support
content creation and ads are the most passive way to do so.

But lately, ads and tracking have become so egregious that the content is
often not worth the hassle of awkward, obstructive ads and very creepy
tracking.

So, lately I’ve switched my browsing to a mixture of Chrome/Mobile Safari vs.
mobile & desktop Brave browser depending on if the account I’m using browses
political/monetizable material.

Next I need to investigate Basic Attention Token to see if it actually does
present a reasonable alternative to ads that makes content creation viable.
Don’t know yet...

------
_rpd
The hypothesis is that ad blocking causes less traffic, but their reasoning is
fairly tenuous ...

> First, ad blocker usage by a site’s visitors reduces the site’s revenue if
> at least some of those users would have visited the site in the absence of
> ad blocking. The relevant mechanism, as in the traditional literature on the
> relationship between intellectual property revenue appropriation and supply,
> is that reduced revenue may undermine a site’s ability to invest, which
> could manifest itself as a diminished site that is less appealing to
> potential visitors. Web users then visit the degraded site less, reducing
> the site’s traffic.

> Second, in the presence of ad blocking, a site’s remaining revenue-
> generating visitors are less ad-intolerant, leading the site to run more
> ads, increasing the nuisance cost of visiting the site.

------
dredmorbius
"Copyright is brain damage."

"Copyright has become the single most serious impediment to access to
knowledge."

"Today we recognize that knowledge is not only a public good but also a global
or international public good.We have also come to recognize that knowledge is
central to successful development. The international community, through
institutions like the World Bank, has a collective responsibility for the
creation and dissemination of one global public good—knowledge for
development."

"What the academic publishing industry calls 'theft' the world calls
'research'."

It's far beyond time to recognise that 1) Copyright is not the solution,
copyright is the problem, and 2) that creators of valuable creative works need
to get paid, somehow.

The intersection of these two statements gives a corollary: _Payment for
access to knowledge is a net harm to society._ Which means that we must find
an alternative method of finance. Salon's misguided plea here is not that
solution. A general tax, proportionate to wealth and/or income, strikes me as
about right.

The quotes above, respectively, are from:

Nina Paley, artist and animator
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO9FKQAxWZc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO9FKQAxWZc)

Pamela Samuelson, copyright legal scholar, UC Berkeley
[http://sfgate.com/opinion/article/Aaron-Swartz-
Opening-](http://sfgate.com/opinion/article/Aaron-Swartz-Opening-) access-to-
knowledge-4224697.php,

Joseph Stigletz, Nobel laureate economist
[http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0195130529.001...](http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0195130529.001.0001/acprof-9780195130522-chapter-14)

Edward Morbius, Space Alien Cat
[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_th...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_the_academic_publishing_industry_calls_theft/)

------
Hextinium
I think that this is more of a case where people will choose to enable ad
blocker on a website that they like and choose to support through their ads.
People will add exceptions to websites they trust and will leave their
blockers on for those who don't. This then leads to a filtering effect where
people vote with their ad blocker if they like a website or not and I think
that that is fine.

------
soulchild37
Pay to see effect of ad blocking? No thanks

------
petraeus
The google search engine rewards click bait its not smart enough to recognize
organic text and organic traffic. It only knows pure clicks and un-ironically
has created the very ecosystem it was meant to destroy.

------
dingo_bat
I don't get it! Why do websites think they have a right to use my CPU and
bandwidth? This is like saying people locking their doors is preventing
thieves from stealing their stuff. Yes, that's the intention.

------
imron
> We conclude that ad blocking poses a threat to the ad-supported web.

Good.

