If a user turns on an ad blocker, that is a clear gesture that he or she is not interested in devoting his or her attention to an ad. It’s like screening marketing phone calls with an answering machine, or turning on a spam filter in an email program. “I am not interested.”
Rather than listening to that clear message, Ars is instead trying to guilt trip its users into caring about something they don’t care about. And they are trying to scam revenue out of their advertisers for ads that are obviously not getting anyone’s attention.
Begging people to turn off their ad blockers is actually immoral on Ars’ part, because they are asking us to help them lie to their advertisers.
I understand fully that content is not free; people who create great content deserve to be paid for that content. So make that argument. Apple does this very effectively with the iTunes store. I gladly pay $2.00 for an episode of the Daily Show with no ads. Other people prefer to watch it on Hulu for no payment, but with ads. Each of us is making a separate statement. Each of is willing to pay, one with money, the other with attention.
It’s not about free vs. paid. It’s about gaining your users’ trust.
Now, read this excellent post from Shawn Blanc "Shawn Blanc"), as well as the other posts linked in his post. (http://shawnblanc.net/2010/03/attention-trust-and-advertising/)) This is a perfect demonstration of how to respect your reader’s gestures, and how to make money by listening to your users in a way that is honest to your readers, yourself, and your advertisers.
If all this talk of ads sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve been through this before. Remember the first dot com bubble? It burst because at long last few companies had figured out a way to make money on the Web. They had all bet the farm on Internet Ads, and eventually, companies figured out that Internet ads were essentially worthless. Well, guess what? Nothing has changed in the decade that has passed since. Ads are still essentially worthless. They’re actually worth even less than before, because ads are now cheaper, which means we need to have a lot more of them, which drives the price of each one down, and so on. It’s a vicious circle, spiraling toward failure.
What does this all mean? A second dot com bubble? You bet.
If there’s one company that should be worried right now about this, it should be Google. No one wants to say it, but Google is essentially a one-trick pony. It has bet the farm on ads to a larger degree than any of the original dot com era companies. When the eventual bottom drops out of the ad business online for the second time, what exactly is Google going to do? Start charging for GMail? Wave? Buzz?
Good luck with that.
You simply can’t give something away for free for a time, and then start charging for it later and expect people not to feel betrayed by that. Offer your content for a fair price in the first place, and users will either gladly pay, or go elsewhere. You’ll never grab the whole world that way, but the people who you do get will follow you into the gates of hell, because they will trust you and respect you.
