Jimtac.com

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.

I very much understand the need to advertise on podcasts, especially video podcasts, they’re expensive to make, and moreso to host and serve. That being said I do take a bit of an issue to short podcasts inserting long ads into their shows. To me I have a personal annoyance level of 1.5:1 content:ads, which seems high to most, but to me if the content is good I’ll sit through ads to ensure I can keep getting my free entertainment.

This week I was glad to see that one of my favorite comic strips turned video podcast ‘Dilbert’ got a sponsor, and with it being the perennial Audible, one that I use myself. The problem, as you may have surmised, is that ‘Dilbert’ has a normal runtime (including credit plates) of ~20 seconds, however with the pre- AND post-roll ads works out to be ~59 seconds. As such the math works out to be much more than 1.5:1 favoring the ads, which means that I’ll probably be unsubscribing by the end of the week, since the content just isn’t worth the waste in my time.

I’m sure that ‘Dilbert’ is not the only only one who does this, Revision3′s ‘Film Riot’ had come close a couple of times in their shorter episodes. I get that advertisers like buying specific chunks of ad time, (30/60/90/120 seconds), and buy sponsorship deals for a period of episodes, or time. This means that whether your episode is 30 minutes, or 3 minutes, your 3 sponsors still want their full 30 second spots.

I do believe that if you are going to accepting advertising, you should be giving both your advertisers, and more importantly, your audience more value. When you’re in your garage with your friends doing something on your own, it’s acceptable to vary length and quality. Once you accept that money, there is an expectation on the part of the advertiser that the quality will go up in order to show that thier money is worth it. However on the part of the viewing audience, the annoyance/intrusions of inserting ads is something that should not impinge on the viewing experience.

If done correctly, it will feel like a minor bump in the flow of the show; the aforementioned ‘Film Riot’ does an amazing job at this, to the point of actually making the ads enjoyable to watch. Unfortunately even this can break the creator/consumer relationship if it exceeds the new content that the viewer/listener tuned in to get, the very content that made the show successful enough to garner the attention of advertisers.

I hope that they will figure out that it’s bad to have more advertising than content, but if not, it will at least help me thin out my podcast subscriptions.

Tim