NPR and KDHX have pledge drives twice a year. The college stations I guess run on scraps leftover from tuition, because they don’t beg on air, at least in my experience.
NPR and KDHX that broadcast begging ads for their station that run one or two weeks at a time twice a year, and extremely low power school stations that are run on school funds and trainees? Your first examples aren’t feasible for internet websites, and your second one isn’t even in the running. How much do you contribute during the pledge drives, btw?
There’s also Patreon which many webcomics are using these days because ads don’t work. Offer some incentives for donors (Sunday comics, extra strips, etc) and keep the rest of the site accessible.
Interestingly, it seems to me there’s been a surprisingly low uptake on advertorial - “sponsored” - content, despite it being fundamentally ad-blocker proof and often having some actual interest beyond “Company X is Teh Awesome”.
In addition to the public radio fundraising drives, the public radio stations I listen to run brief sponsorship messages at the start of programs that are indistinguishable from commercials. (“Brought to you by Lumber Liquidators and the new movie Moonlight, now playing at a theater near you.”)
I think you could do this in a couple ways, both as a “Five Times Coca-Cola Saved Humanity” sort of way or just as running a standard article with a text header or perhaps the sponsor’s logo put into the article’s graphics or some other way of branding it. You’re making the title graphics anyway, so if you added in a sponsor’s watermark or used a corner for their logo, etc then viewers would see it without ad-blocking it.
Despite the repeated demands for us to fix this, the answer is probably: there is no single fix. Some sites would do best to get their money via donation, others via subscription service, others via sponsorship and others via natively running ads that are actually about their audience again rather than AdBlockers stopping the farmed out “Drivers in [Town] are furious about this insurance rule!” garbage. Or, you know, other ideas not mentioned yet. Part of why the current model is broken is because it’s so ubiquitous that a single browser add-on throws it into chaos. That should tell you something.
I’ve run an adblocker ever since I knew what one was.
OTTOMH, I can think of about four sites I would donate to. Three have online tip jars set up for this purpose. When I found out that Leisure Suite Larry Reloaded was coming out, I bought a copy from the company rather than downloading it illegally. It wouldn’t have been hard to find an illegal copy. But, I understood that Al Lowe (great guy by the way) and the rest need to get paid.
RE TANSTAAFL
I understand that running a website costs money. As has been said, I had no problem with non invasive ads on sites. I have problems with pop ups, pop unders, ads with audio that can’t be muted, ads that deliver malware etc.
Re TV
I’ve been saying for years we’ll soon see the end of commercials as we know them. Instead of thirty seconds of ads, we’ll have a banner that occasionally jumps from left side to right and top to bottom (If it stayed in the same place it could just be blocked with cardboard), and extreme product placement. Instead of “Would you like a Coke?” a character will say “mmm, Coca Cola! It’s the best soft drink! Boy that really thrills and refreshes!” and so on.
So, The Truman Show basically.
Exactly. Clickbait doesn’t work - everyone knows there isn’t “One weird trick” you can use to lose 20kg in a week or make millions on the stock exchange from nothing, for example.
At least advertorial/sponsored content gets the advertiser’s name in there and doesn’t “trick” the reader - if you’ve got a Cracked.com-style “Five unusual uses for Coca-Cola that don’t involve drinking it” story, people will be legitimitely interested in reading it and Coke get their brand in front of the eyeballs of people who have made a conscious choice to read that story, knowing it’s about their product.
Part of the issue is the media themselves. Most journalists I know turn their noses up in disgust at the idea of writing advertorial copy so it’s actually hard to find people with the right combination of journalistic skills and writing style along with the attitude that just because something involves a large company paying to get its message out doesn’t make the message terrible or invalid or unworthy.
Not indistinguishable at all. Advertising, as I’ve tried to define it in this thread, is psychological warfare. Simply informing people that you have a business is not. Just listen to NPR for a while and then turn on “Hot 97” or some other shitty commercial station. You can easily tell the difference.
Advertising:
Not advertising, just “sponsorship”, “underwriting” or “information”:
The former is a cancer on society and should truly not exist. I believe in free speech, so I don’t advocate banning it, but massive societal pressure to end the practice is fair game, and using tools to block them wherever possible is absolutely necessary.
The latter is harmless and even beneficial. 100% of the ads my ad-blocker blocks are of the “cancer on society” variety. There’s a reason they don’t call it “advertising” on NPR. It’s “underwriting” or something similar. Because advertising is insidious and evil, and what they play on NPR is not.
Orlando Sentinal Landing page is clear, but you’ll get notices if you go to an article.
One of my aggregate sites linked to a story on the Sentinal and it blocked me until I disabled my ad blocker. So with this thread in mind I decided to see how bad it would be.
First. multiple notices from Firefox about waiting for some.adprovider.whatever. I didn’t log or count them, but more than 6. Noticeable wait to finally display article.
Second. There were two closable ads overlapping the article at the bottom of the screen.
Third. Full screen closable ad completely obscuring the article until you close it.
Fourth. Repeat first through third for every article you click to.
Conclusion. Sticking with ad-blocker. No site has exclusive articles.
I don’t know why I can’t get notices now that I’m trying to. I am using Chrome on a PC with uBlock Origin and Disconnect in conjunction just as I always have. Both are showing me that they are blocking. Orlando Sentinal is working fine for me. Tried multiple articles.
Then it looks like uBlock Origin is one step ahead in the ad-block-blocker-stealth game.
I may be changing services.
I installed uBlock yesterday and it lets me look at Forbes articles.
Disabled uBlock and Diconnect, installed AdBlock, and I can look at Forbes and Orlando Sentinal articles. I’m using Chrome browser.
Actually, not at all. Everybody says this, but research has shown that many people who “never click on ads” actually do, and with some frequency. And that that frequency increases as ads get better targeted. Nothing in the advertising world happens by chance or without being extensively studied.
For my part, I don’t care much either way. Running a web site is expensive; if that cost isn’t going to be passed on to the end user (me!), they’ve got to make money somehow. Currently, that means ads. And for all the talk of malware, I don’t run ad-blockers, don’t turn off javascript, allow cookies, and visit lots of sites (albeit mostly reputable ones) – I see a lot of ads, and I’ve never had ad-delivered malware. (Although I do use a Mac and Safari as my standard browser.).
Maybe it depends where on lives?
Forbes has quit bugging (some) people about their adblockers
Cite?
Cite?
I skimmed through it and I don’t see it fulfilling DocCathode’s first cite request.