A few bad apples

I write all my own software at all my websites and of course that includes the software that generates ads for pages. I rotate ads between ad networks and vary the sizes and positions to help combat ad blindness. You won't see as much of that at this site (I don't expect much advertising income here) but I do expend a lot of effort on ads and ad placement other places.

As part of that, I also keep track of how many ads of each type I run. For example, my software keeps a little log that looks like this:

 G 29371 Y 20226 H 605 C 948 A 744
 
 

That tells me that during the period between log clearing, I ran a little more than 29,000 Google ads, 20,000 or so Yahoo ads, and a handful of Chitika, Amazon and "House" ads. I use those logs to fine tune the ratios I assign through software.

One little problem though: a lot of those ads were never seen because more and more people are using ad blocking software.

In a way, I can't blame people for doing that. Pop-up and pop-under ads are the most annoying examples, but too many websites just overload their pages with ads. I particularly detest the sites that break articles into extremely small sections (paragraph level in the worst examples) in order to show even more ads. There are a lot of bad advertising practices, so it is understandable that people use blockers to clean up assault.

On the other hand, some advertising is valuable to the readers, and that is particularly apt to be so on technical sites: a relevant ad on a page can add to the viewers information and may be exactly what they are looking for. Those who are heartily sick of inappropriate and intrusive ads might agree but still say the trade off is worth the loss.

However, something has to pay for content. The web sites I run cost me several hundred dollars per month in hosting fees and many hours of my time. I am fortunate in that I get consulting income in addition to advertising revenues from these sites, but the advertising is an important and necessary part of my income stream. If that gets taken away because all the visitors never even see the ads, I may have to consider either switching to a paid content model or switching to lower cost (and less reliable) hosting or even abandoning the effort entirely.

Other possibilities include serving part of the content regardless of ad blocking but using more sophisticated programming to deliberately block parts of the content when ads are blocked. That's not easy to do, and could be quite annoying for readers, but something like that may be unavoidable. Ideally, you'd get to see part of the article, just enough to decide if its worth unblocking ads to see the rest.

Other avoidance techniques may involve pre-fetching ad content and displaying it from local storage so that it is indistinguishable from local content and carries nothing that identifies it to browser software. I do that with some of my advertising now, but this is more difficult. It may become necessary if the ad blocking trend continues.

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