I just got a “friendly reminder” at one of my usual haunts to disable my adblocker software to “help” the website in question…
It seems like the debate here often devolves into a chicken-and-egg kind of debate. If I am not going to click on any ads, whether I am actively blocking them, or not, then there is no difference between ignoring an ad, or actively blocking it, right? Or is there new software that tracks how many users use adblocks, with said data passed on to the advertisers? But, again, if I am not going to click on anything, there is no fundamental difference, right…?
The sites get some multiples of tenths/hundreths of a cent for displaying the ad. Lots of eyeballs means pretty decent money for a popular website. And thus, such a popuar website will henceforth make even more per view. Same with clicks. If you use Adblock (I like uBlock), you don’t see the ad and you don’t click. So less income for the website.
According to a cite on Wikipedia’s Online Advertising article, in 2012 about 1/3rd of all online advertising was paid on a cost per impression basis, and 2/3rds on a cost per click basis. So for about 1/3rd of ads, the “I wasn’t going to click it anyway” argument doesn’t hold any water. They were going to be paid just for displaying it.
I’m agreeing with Coriolanus completely, in case that’s not clear. I just wanted to add a statistic with respect to the large portion of Internet advertising that is cost per impression.
You make it sound like their alternative is to put up ads for which they get paid whether or not anyone ever sees it. It wouldn’t really even meet the definition of an ad if you got paid whether or not you displayed it to anybody.
There’s a difference between “whether or not you display it” and “whether or not anybody sees it.” If it’s a TV ad for a show that nobody watches, a billboard on a street nobody drives down, or a website nobody goes to, nobody sees it, but people still advertise in all those places. So, yeah, people get paid for ads nobody every sees. The difference here is that with websites counting how many people use the site with no adblocker, they can get paid based on how many people actually see the ad.
If they have no way of determining how many people have adblockers, then they’re reporting every single hit as having seen the ad, and this number is probably wrong.
If they do have a way to determine how many people have adblockers, they can more accurately report how many people actually saw it.
If they find that a significant percentage of their customers have adblockers, they can take this into account when they decide whether or not to post these kinds of ads in the future.
I use Adblock Plus, so yes, I am one of the “bad guys”. However, looking at it from an industry-wide perspective, I am absolutely certain that the advertisers know that adblockers are in use and probably have reasonable statistics on how often they are used. Given that, the use of adblockers would devalue ads in general, i.e. in the absence of adblockers a company might be willing to pay $X to place an ad, but with the knowledge that adblockers are out there they may only be willing to pay $0.5X, thus dramatically reducing the funds available to support the site that you are enjoying.
So, it’s not you in particular that matters, it’s the entire population that uses adblockers that matters.
If by “website” you mean the people running the website, they generally don’t. There is technically a way to do it, but I’ve never seen it actually done, and it would require cooperation between the ad provider and the website.
If you mean “how does the website itself change based on whether you have adblock?” then the answer is one of two things, depending on what the website does.
The website displays a banner asking you to support them, or other such: that’s easy. They just have the banners there, but then position the ads so they covers them up.
The site reduces functionality when you have adblock: this generally works by serving up a fake ad, which your adblock blocks. The fake ad is actually what provides the functionality of the site.
Both of these are generally easy to circumvent, but sites can be tricky. One such tricky site is Hulu. They are technically using technique number 1, where the warning about not allowing ads is always there, but the ad goes on top of it. But they take it a bit further because the ads are video and communicate back to Hulu when they are finished. If you block the ads, they don’t know the ad is finished. On the main site, this results in just a really long wait. But, on some third-party sites, this results in the show never coming back on.
In theory, this could be used by sites with static ads, where the ads communicate some encrypted key back to the original website, telling it that the ads have been displayed. Then the website could do what it wants with that information. But, like I said, I’ve never seen that.
It’s just not worth upsetting adblock users, as upset users are unlikely to buy something from the ad anyways. Even site owner tend to do nothing more than ask, as otherwise users will just not use the site at all. And there are often other ways to get people to contribute.
(For most indie video producers, sites like Patreon get them more money. Each penny earned that way is worth hundreds of video ads.)
I run Adblock (with the so-called unintrusive ads turned off — unintrusive ads are like only a little pregnant), Adblock Plus Pop-Up Addon and Element Hiding Helper for Adblock Plus. And I’m proud of it.
Ads are evil. They not only try to keep track of me on any particular site, they attempt to track me all over the net. They and the people who create and sell them are the prime movers, other than nation-states, of serial trackers and other malware. Its those same assholes wanting a piece of my life who attempt to lay on the guilt trips for not making it easier for them to do so.
Fuck them and the horses they rode in on.
I don’t stop at Adblock. I also run Ghostery, Google search link fix, Google no-tracking URL, Remove Google Tracking, Remove Google Tracking for Copy, Remove Yahoo Tracking, Search Engine Security, Self-Destructing Cookies and Prefbar that gives very easy and on-demand, fine-grained cookie control.
Firefox also has a “do not track” option (until Firefox Version 39 available only in about:config) that I have turned on (not that it means much).
Which reminds me: I haven’t checked Mozilla’s addon site lately for new anti-trackers and blockers.
I loathe ads and the creators and marketers they represent so much that I won’t watch a TV show that I haven’t recorded, including PBS’s with their sponsorship “announcements,” so I can fast-forward them into a blur. If the psychopath ad industry didn’t have so much money and power to bribe governments and get away with it, TV ads would be blockable.
I won’t own a “smart TV.” It wouldn’t surprise me, though, if they are made compulsory.
It’s very easy to detect ad blockers using Javascript. Typically what you do is create something that looks like an ad (ex: It has the word ‘advert’ in it) and then later detect if it’s present on the page. If not, you show some polite message about squirrels (like Fark.com does) and ask them to un-block your website.
I would argue that those of us who use ad-blockers actively improve life for the advertisers, although not the websites: by eliminating those of us who loathe ads from the pool of viewers, they are targeting more directly on the rummy sort of people who actually buy from ads. Reductio ad absurdos.
Absurdos being the cousins of weirdos.
I don’t mind seeing ads, if the alternatives are that sites I like go broke and disappear or move to a subscription model I can’t afford. I turn off AdBlock on sites I go to regularly unless the ads themselves interfere with my ability to use the site (with autoplay, by slowing the site to a crawl, by triggering a virus warning, whatever).
In reality, ads can be a bit of both. Some ad schemes pay a small amount for impressions as eell as clicks; with some of the others, the value of the clicks is affected by the volume of impressions.
Pretty much this is how I approach ads, myself. Nothing in life is free. If I want websites to keep operating, this is my payment to a lot of them. I’ll give them all a fair shot to show me good ads before turning the blocker on. Luckily, the ones that need my ad revenue the most are usually the ones that put the most effort into their ads to be pertinent and not scams, so I don’t feel a need to block the ads in the first place. And I’ve found a few excellent artists and indie retailers to spend my buck at, so I consider it a win-win.
Advertisements aren’t inherently evil. And as cited above, a fair amount of websites earn revenue just from displaying ads.
Many of those ads (maybe all) contain web bugs, one-pixel-by-one-pixel invisible graphics that send back all the info they can glean from your computer, even if the ad agency doesn’t plant trackers and/supercookies. They’re a big favourite among email advertisers.