> Ad-blocking will lead to almost $22 billion of lost advertising revenue this year, according to the report, put together by Adobe and PageFair, a Dublin-based start-up that helps companies and advertisers recoup some of this lost revenue.
I guess assuming that the users of ad blocker users would visit the sites with the same frequency as without ad blockers, and they click on ads with the same probability if they see them as people who don't use ad blockers.
This is the same fallacy as counting the lost money on pirated content. Most people who pirate wouldn't buy a product even if they couldn't pirate it. The solution is much simpler for ad ridden websites: what about not serving the main content for ad block users? If you don't like them then don't serve them, it shouldn't be that hard. Maybe they don't do this because:
- Ad blockers are still a minority on most websites
- They don't eat up much bandwidth
- It would be really bad advertising (ha!) for them doing more harm than good
> what about not serving the main content for ad block users?
Some porn sites have started to do that. Well it's not like there is only 1 porn site on the planet... There lies the
issue with that method.
Unless every content provider does that it is not going to work. And it's also a cat and mouse game just like piracy. The technology will always be ahead of whatever scheme they use to block content.
As a musician, I get somehow a taste of revenge from all that crowd that is freaking out, the same crowd told us to "adapt or die" 10 years ago. Well they now need to adapt or die, because ad revenue will not be a viable business model 3 years from now...
Publishers have the same problem musicians do: it's (a) ridiculously easy to publish now (text or music), (b) you're literally competing with every other publisher/musician in the entire world. There's a larger consumer pie, but a ridiculously larger producer pie. http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-aesthe...
> There's a larger consumer pie, but a ridiculously larger producer pie
No it's just that people don't want to pay for stuff on the internet, period. This is valid for all digital goods, music,books,movies,news and co. Whether there is competition or not it doesn't matter.
> it's (a) ridiculously easy to publish now (text or music),
producing =/= publishing
A published crap will still be crap. Producing something good takes effort and it's valid for all digital goods including the press. And since nobody's willing to pay for that work, more and more crap get published,which makes people want to buy less and less.
> No it's just that people don't want to pay for stuff on the internet, period. This is valid for all digital goods, music,books,movies,news and co. Whether there is competition or not it doesn't matter.
Hence why iTunes was a failure, let alone Netflix? Make it easy and the customers will come. (I was actually surprised that iTunes worked, and people were willing to pay as long as it was sufficiently convenient.) Just not enough for the massively greater creator pool, as talentless bozos like me can put music out there too.
Exactly. I spend way more on digital media than I did ten years ago. Games on GOG especially, some on steam (if there's no DRM-free version), digital music downloads from bandcamp, direct from artists and in some cases through resellers.
There's nothing about being on the internet that makes people not want to spend money. Some people are just cheapskates and will never buy your stuff and some people don't have economic resources to do so (for example students, etc). Chasing these people will just eat up your time. Focus on the paying customers.
> Well it's not like there is only 1 porn site on the planet... There lies the issue with that method.
How is that an issue? They get literally no revenue from theses users. I get there's some sort of worth of mouth marketing from theses users... but usually is the same with adblock so essentially it just mean more user that doesn't worth anything.
I'm not actually sure who they check for it. I assume they have some JavaScript running on the page that looks to see if the resource was actually loaded? I just turned adblock off for that one site because I don't care enough and the ads aren't that bad.
I can say I watched a lot of grey market content when I could a) not afford otherwise seeing it, and b) when there were nor reasonable offers like Netflix. Since there's Netflix in my country my grey market consumption has diminished to less than 10%. And 100% of that remaining content is content I can't get on Netflix.
The reality is advertising is a brainless way to refinance for content. That's one of the reasons people minimized buying DVD/Bluray, or watching tv (I am not even connected to public tv any more). Find a better way and people will pay.
Finding that way might be hard, harder than I think, but I don't think the whole text media industry will go down before they find a model that works.
> what about not serving the main content for ad block users? If you don't like them then don't serve them, it shouldn't be that hard.
Harder than you think. Ad blockers actively subvert attempts to detect them with code and filter updates. If ad blockers were easy to detect we would surely see more of that.
I guess assuming that the users of ad blocker users would visit the sites with the same frequency as without ad blockers, and they click on ads with the same probability if they see them as people who don't use ad blockers.
This is the same fallacy as counting the lost money on pirated content. Most people who pirate wouldn't buy a product even if they couldn't pirate it. The solution is much simpler for ad ridden websites: what about not serving the main content for ad block users? If you don't like them then don't serve them, it shouldn't be that hard. Maybe they don't do this because:
- Ad blockers are still a minority on most websites
- They don't eat up much bandwidth
- It would be really bad advertising (ha!) for them doing more harm than good