Web advertising
by Tim on Mar.07, 2010, under Blog, Personal, Tech
Earlier today there was a great post from Ars Technica about the necessity of advertising on the internet, or rather the harm done by ad-blocking software. Now over the years I’ve been doing personal websites, business, and at one point even a podcast with my good friend Neil; all for myself, and all out of my own pocket. This is pretty much how any of these sites that become ad-supported businesses started themselves. I applaud their ability to be able to quit their “day jobs”, and even grow into something bigger than themselves, which is just amazing to me.
The issue with ad-blocking is one that can be quite polarizing, for instance there is one camp that thinks that ad-blocking is a god given right of the internet, and the other thinks that it’s the tool of the devil. Luckily the Ars article tried to split the difference, though unfortunately it comes across being quite a bit on the latter, and it’s perfectly understandable why as well, since it’s not just one individual relying on that ad revenue. If it was a one person site then they could pack things up and it’s only really affects themselves, but once you become responsible for others, then he whole world changes.
I personally do use ad blockers in firefox, [though not in chrome which I now primarily use on all of my Macs], but I use a more surgical approach than simply hitting block every time I see an ad. The whole reason that I started using adblock in the first place was because of those distasteful ads that the Ars Technica article spoke of, them and the ones that block my view of the content that I would otherwise prefer to support, and if I have to keep blocking ads when visiting a particular site, I just stop visiting those sites since I’m obviously not the target audience for the ads that they are accepting, and supporting sites that accept ads that I find objectionable [in whatever sense] is not something that I’ll be doing anytime soon.
I’m not going to stop using ad-blockers to remove content that I don’t want to be subjected to, ads or otherwise, but I will continue to make judicious use of the whitelist, as well as the blacklist features of them, in order to ensure that I contribute to the content that I want to see remains available for me to consume, and I hope that you do to.
