The Real Solution to Ad Blockers
Ken Fisher posted an article yesterday, venting about why he and his associates at Ars Technica feel that website ad blockers are “devastating” to the sites “we love.” I can’t help but walk away from reading the post feeling like Fisher and the Ars team are simply stomping their feet and whining about something that’s really not our problem.
I may not have ads on my own blog, but I browse hundreds of websites a day and experience the good and the bad of the internet advertising world on a regular basis. I can understand why a visitor to a website might want to block some ads. The plethora of grotesque teeth whitening ads on Facebook are a great example. Some are simply irrelevant, while others are just plain offensive. Ad “blockers” are just tools that provide a solution to a perceived problem.
There are good ads, mind you. My friend Chris Bowler is one of the founding partners of Fusion Ads, who delivers beautifully designed, thoughtfully placed ads on websites that draw the most discerning and critical eyes. They are in a completely different class from the bottom-shelf, low-quality ads you’ll find on Facebook or other popular blogs. If I’m ever able to attract an ad company for my blog, I hope it’s Fusion. And I would never in a million years consider blocking a Fusion ad. Ever.
Apples and Oranges
Fisher’s argument is based on the analogy of a restaurant. He likens ad-blocking visitors to customers who eat a meal and leave without paying, going as far as to correlate bandwidth usage to coffee and sandwiches. But this metaphor leaves out so many other facts that it easily confuses apples and oranges.
First, bandwidth is not a resource visitors are obligated to “pay” for. Bandwidth is a utility expense, not a service. If I decided to open up a book store on Main St., I would have to pay for electricity, internet access, phone service and heat. These are not costs that only incur when someone visits the store. I’d have to pay for them whether I see a single customer or not. So please, don’t start claiming that each and every visitor is obligated to pay (by viewing your ads) for bandwidth. That’s not our problem, sorry.
Second, this complaint completely ignores a growing group of visitors who use ClicktoFlash, a Safari plugin that disables Flash on websites until the user decides they’d like to view it. These people aren’t setting out to block your Flash-based ads – they are just wanting to block Flash itself. If there was a way to deliver a non-Flash version to those visitors, then the ads would receive far more impressions. But this isn’t a problem the visitor is responsible for fixing. This, like paying for bandwidth, is YOUR problem to solve.
Attention and Trust
There’s a discussion happening right now about ads, impressions, attention and trust. Writers like John Gruber, Shawn Blanc, Jason Snell and more have been dialoging about the real currencies in the visitor-to-blog relationship: attention and trust. I think ad blocking is a symptom of the larger problem, which is a lack of trust. But Fisher would like to force people to trust his blog, while the real solution works the other way. The publisher needs to create content worth caring about, and only exhibit ads from companies that it feels its readers would resonate with.
When someone visits a blog for, say, iPod news, and they are accosted with a half dozen web hosting ads, they die a little inside. It’s obvious that fake iPod blog is simply shilling the goods of the highest bidder. If you want to earn your readers’ attention, offer just the ads they will relate to and find interesting. Then, rather than selling unrelated crap, you’ll be offering things your readers would actually want. The ad becomes more of an extension of your content, and less a way to pay for bandwidth. Ars Technica could take a lesson from a blog like John Gruber’s DaringFireball. While they are currently advertising GQ Magazine on their technology news blog, Gruber is advertising SourceBits, a Mac, iPhone & web app development company. GQ doesn’t fit Ars in anyway, but SourceBits fits right into the sweet-spot of Gruber’s readership.
When I feel like the publisher of a blog/site is sharing something with me that I’m likely to be interested in, I appreciate it. When a website splashes ads for something I could care less about, I feel violated and used. Ars Technica wants people to stop blocking the ads on their site. I think the better solution is to display ads that better reflect the interests of their readers. People don’t block what they don’t mind seeing.
A couple comments:
The customer IS obligated to pay for overhead. Or rather, the business owner has a responsibility to roll overhead into their business plan (and thus into the cost of the product).
The problem is, in this model, the CUSTOMER isn’t the blog reader–it’s the advertiser! The blogger’s business model is to deliver eyeballs to paying customers. Thus to try to make the readers obligated to the blogger just doesn’t make sense–it’s the blogger’s problem of how to acquire his product (ie. eyeballs), not the reader’s. As long as the reader isn’t asked to pay for the product, there is no economic interaction between the content creator and the reader. This is the problem that most ad networks and big content creators don’t understand–I’m not your customer, and therefore I don’t owe you anything. If that means you’re not going to give me your content for free, I completely understand (but, to tangent slightly, don’t forget that I can probably get it for free somewhere else and if I can’t, I can probably get something comparable).
The trust issue is why Google is so successful as an ad network: their ads are rarely intrusive or offensive, making them easy to add almost anywhere. Their content matching is ok, making them a good choice for almost any blogger or website.
Good post.