Ad Blocking: a personal right or a scourge to quality content
Ars Technica took a stand against adblocking, with interesting results.
For most websites, ad blocking isn’t currently a big problem. Jack Wallington from the Internet Advertising Bureau described the total number of people blocking ads in the UK as “negligible”. However, it can become an issue for specialist technology sites, whose users are very net-savvy. One such site is Ars Technica, where earlier this year the issue of ad blocking came to a head.
Ars Technica’s editor in chief Ken Fisher estimated that around 40 per cent of the site’s visitors were blocking ads. Without warning its readers, Ars Technica undertook a 12-hour experiment: to stop serving content to those visitors who were using AdBlock Plus. Fisher claims it was a success, but also that it was never intended as a long-term fix, rather just a way to open a dialogue on the subject.
↑ Ars Technica took a stand against ad blocking
It certainly did that, causing uproar and confusion among readers. “What we weren’t expecting is so many people were blocking ads and didn’t even know it,” he said. “It left a lot of people very confused. They started digging around, wasting an hour trying to fix their broken computer.”
Reactions in the long term were more balanced and varied. Around 200 regular users signed up for subscriptions to an ad-free version of the site, and 1,200 emailed Fisher to say they had whitelisted the site on their ad blocker. What we don’t know is how many visitors were angered or alienated by the move.
Fisher late wrote on his blog: “There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won’t hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per-view basis. If you have an ad blocker running, and you load 10 pages on the site, you consume resources from us, but provide us with no revenue. “My argument is simple: blocking ads can be devastating to the sites you love.”