Over at Ars Technica, founder Ken Fisher has an interesting post on ad blockers and a devilish experiment that Ars performed on Friday: For twelve hours, it blocked back, preventing users of ad-blocking software from seeing any content. Fisher says the counterstrike was a mixed success at best. But he also says that forty percent of Ars visitors block ads, and that doing so can be “devastating to the sites you love.”
As I’ve said before, Technologizer doesn’t need everybody to see the ads here–just a critical mass of folks. I don’t have a reliable way to measure how many visitors use an ad blocker, but here’s a guesstimate: In February, roughly fifteen percent of all Technologizer page views had the ads blocked. I might be more alarmed if the numbers looked more like Ars’, but we have that critical mass of people who don’t block ads. And I’m sure that some of the visitors who block are leaving worthwhile comments, telling their friends about Technologizer, or otherwise doing things that make this a better site and a better business proposition.
Or to put it another way: Ad blocking isn’t devastating Technologizer.
In the Ars post, Fisher says that he takes pride in the fact that his site’s ads aren’t in-your-face crud. Which led me to realize that although Technologizer has a number of guiding principles about the advertising we carry, I’ve never outlined them here.
First of all, my overarching philosophy when it comes to ad-related matters is pretty simple: In the face of financial realities, I attempt to err on the side of making myself happy. By which I mean, we do things that I don’t mind when I’m reading other sites, and try to avoid the things that tick me off.
A few examples:
- Technologizer turns down ad formats that make me gnash my teeth elsewhere (such as text links within stories, which we’ve repeatedly been approached about adding).
- When we do run ads that go further than most to grab your attention (such as one you may see on this very page) we put limits on their activity so they don’t drive you completely bonkers. And such ads are a once-in-a-while thing rather than a constant onslaught.
- We run multiple ads on most pages, but don’t cram ten or fifteen of them into every available crevice, as some bigger sites do. And I hope it goes without saying that when we run ads, it’s clear they’re ads.
- We work with a classy ad partner–Federated Media–who does a great job of finding advertisers who are relevant to the Technologizer community. You won’t find ads involving moms who have discovered cures for yellow teeth here, and we’ve been known to ban some advertisers, period.
- We do break longer stories into multiple pages, which exposes you to more ads than if an article was on one very long page. But we chop them up much less than most sites–a multi-page Technologizer story has two to three times as many words per page than is typical elsewhere. (Side note: Yes, I know that we lack a single-page/printer-friendly view, but we don’t have a religious stance on them–we just haven’t gotten around to implementing one.)
- We run slideshows, which can involve a lot of clicks. But we don’t run many of them, and try to make every one special.
- Our RSS feed offers ad-free full-text versions of all content (first page only for multiple-page posts).
- We have a number of methods of making money that don’t involve display advertising at all, such as our shopping/product researh feature. (When you click on the links to online merchants, we receive a small finders’s fee.)
I don’t think there’s any way to support editorial content through advertising in a way that will make everybody happy all of the time. (If there was, ad blockers wouldn’t exist.) But we’re trying–and we’re grateful for both the support that makes Technologizer a viable business and the constructive criticism that helps us help you.
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