Why Stack Overflow Doesn’t Care About Ad Blockers

https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2016/02/why-stack-overflow-doesnt-care-about-ad-blockers/

by smacktoward • 10 years ago

395 165 10 years ago

blog.stackoverflow.com

bobby_9x5• 10 years ago

It's true that if a person just doesn't like them they won't click on them.

However, if Adblock becomes a default install, you will have more and more people never clicking on the ads because they never knew about them in the first place.

I hate annoying ads, but this will eventually make it impossible for small business owners to make a living through ads.

The playing field will be only big corporations, because they can handle ad blocks. The same thing has happened with the music industry over the past decade and it's just repeating in a new industry.

I feel like the new generation is pushing for more government and corporate control.

V-22• 10 years ago

I wouldn't want adblocking to be the default setting, but does anyone actually propose it?

cm2012• 10 years ago

A good proportion of HN, judging by comments, thinks all advertising should be illegal in all circumstances because trying to persuade someone to do something is immoral.

Edit: "A good proportion", not all. Probably 20%? The other 80% indeed are just against tracking/privacy/bandwidth/security, and the last 10% are fine as is.

tajen• 10 years ago

Does Chrome now ship with an adblocker, suggested at installation?

roaring_spring• 10 years ago

I am leaning towards this view. Advertising has existed since pretty much the advent of writing and commerce but technological advances have made it increasingly sinister. Through targeting, automated split testing and other advanced methods the advertising industry seems to exist to weaponize psychological research.

bobby_9x5• 10 years ago

Nobody is proposing it per se, but many companies and people are installing it on every browser. The average person probably didn't even care about seeing ads in the first place.

Forcibly removing revenue streams in the tech industry is not really going to help any future business owners.

Sure, Ad revenue isn't the only way to make money, but when you have $0 startup capital, it's many times the only way.

This only pushes out the smaller business owner and average person that wants to make some extra money and gives more power to big companies and venture capitalists.

Nobody seems to think long-term, only in their own self-interest.

eva1984• 10 years ago

Firefox does. I recently see an, ironically, advertisement on Caltrain, sells me that. Guess they might use TV ads to promote their ad-free browser, when this becomes the norm?

15charlimit• 10 years ago

this will eventually make it impossible for small business owners to make a living through ads

You say that like it's a bad thing. If a piece of content or a given website cannot survive without ads propping it up, was it ever worth anything in the first place? Ads are far from the only revenue-generating method available nowadays, they're just the easiest/laziest.

When online advertising-as-we-know-it finally chokes to death under a mountain of its own waste, maybe we'll see a drop in blatant linkbait lowest-common-denominator garbage that drives up the S/N ratio. There may be less content overall, but I suspect the content that survives will be much higher quality as a result.

Not that I particularly care which way things go, I run adblockers on all of my machines from a security standpoint as much as anything else.

bobby_9x5• 10 years ago

"You say that like it's a bad thing."

This is Ycombinator, a site for supposed future business owners. Yes, it's a bad thing.

"If a piece of content or a given website cannot survive without ads propping it up, was it ever worth anything in the first place? Ads are far from the only revenue-generating method available nowadays, they're just the easiest/laziest."

Sure. Instead, we will now have fully integrated advertising that can't be blocked.

Would you rather see an advertisement or an entire article on a blog centered around a product? The average consumer isn't going to take a stand on things like this because they just don't care. It will only pollute the content that you actually enjoy even more.

"There may be less content overall, but I suspect the content that survives will be much higher quality as a result."

Higher quality content doesn't pay the bills alone. I don't mind because my business doesn't rely on ad revenue.

However, when I see more and more people clamoring for something like a 'basic income', I really start to shake my head...because things like this are quickly destroying many jobs.

It's not the first time the tech community has dug their own salary grave and then cried out to everyone when they can't pay the bills or they lose their house.

This is why I'm not on the other side of this: I would rather take advantage of this foolishness than be forced into it.

toast0• 10 years ago

An important part of the QA process is ensuring that not just the creative, but the advertiser is relevant to our audience. Every single ad to appear on any of our sites is vetted by the operations team.* We check copy and content on the ads as well as the landing pages. What we repeatedly ask ourselves in this QA process is quite simple: is this relevant to users?

If other sites did this, maybe ad blocking wouldn't be so prevalent.

sarciszewski• 10 years ago

Neither would malvertising, I wager.

meterplech• 10 years ago

I think the dirty not-so-secret of advertising is that for most content on the web the ads are awful, poorly targeted (or at best basic retargeted). Many content producers want to focus on building great content, so advertisers go for low CPMs and spray and pray. This is why the brands are so interested in Facebook and other platforms that seem to be able to deliver great content and are, increasingly, willing to pay the differential.

It's impressive to see StackOverflow putting this together in-house and I imagine it'll continue to be a competitive differentiator for companies that can pull it off going forward.

stevesearer5• 10 years ago

Targeting is pretty difficult unless you have a well-defined audience or type of content.

My site matches office furniture ads against photo tours of office spaces - fairly is easy to see why they would work. StackOverflow attracts a specific type of person so it seems like the targeting is built-in.

I don't envy a general news site like CNN where you're trying to target specific types of people who read CNN as opposed to an industry vertical.

emsy• 10 years ago

I once googled (before I had privacy plugins) for a coffee machine. Bought coffee machine. I was stalked by coffee machine ads for a month.

shkkmo4• 10 years ago

It's not enough.

Privacy Badger (https://www.eff.org/privacybadger) blocks a bunch of stuff on StackOverflow.

Blocks Scripts:

www.google-analytics.com

edge.quantserve.com

b.scorecardresearch.com

Blocks Cookie Only:

ajax.googleapis.com

www.gravatar.com

i.stack.imgur.com

Blocks nothing:

cdn.sstatic.net

Add content relevancy is one part of the equation, but not allowing third parties to track my actions on your site is the other, more important part of the equation (to me at least). Privacy Badger is the only adBlocker I use (besides having flash not run automatically), so I will happily view ads that don't involve tracking me.

wldcordeiro• 10 years ago

None of the things you listed would be things most consumers care to block. In fact most are things they either want or could benefit from (analytics.)

JohnTHaller• 10 years ago

The state of website statistics is a sad one. The better site analysis engines were bought years ago by Google (becoming Google analytics) and the like and the lesser ones died. A few are still around kicking, including some quite good ones, but most advertisers, sponsors, etc will only trust third party analytics in determining advertising rates, sponsorship levels, etc.

Essentially, users who block analytics become a net negative for many sites as they add no positive value to the site operator and are just a drain on resources. There are exceptions, of course, in the case of user-generated content participation where submitting content, making comments, etc may be a draw to revenue-generating visitors. But on many sites, that user blocking ads and analytics is only hurting the site operator. If it becomes more popular - say as the default setting in an ad blocker - I'd wager we'll have some sites start to block those users at some point in the future.

ljk2• 10 years ago

i.stack.imgur.com

what's imgur doing on stackoverflow?

ceejayoz3• 10 years ago

"Privacy Badger blocks a bunch of stuff on StackOverflow."

"Here's a list of above-board analytics services and CDNs."

mcv• 10 years ago

Reminds me of Penny Arcade's ad policy. They made the ads themselves, with their own art, for games they loved. You can't get much more relevant than that.

ck2• 10 years ago

EXACTLY

Our belief is that if someone doesn’t like them, and they won’t click on them, any impressions served to them will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads to people who won’t click on them harms campaign performance.

and you know what, it's not the ad so much that bothers me, it's the 27 trackers added to the page by three ads in adsense and all their roundtrips and javascript lag

I wish we could bring back the days of text ads that were interesting.

fabian2k• 10 years ago

Stack Exchange also reduces the amounts of ads for all users that have more than 200 reputation. This is a pretty easy threshold to hit, and after that only the ads in the sidebar remain. So many of the active SO users will only see a small amount of ads anyway.

WaxProlix• 10 years ago

This addresses a lot of complaints people have with ads from a UX perspective, but misses some of the technical reasons that a lot of folks (probably disproportionately represented on sites like SO) have for blocking ads and tracking scripts, which is that they're fucking intrusive, not just on a given experience but into one's life. Since most ad impressions are coupled with some persona creation and event linking these days, it's not as simple as "we want to make ads more relevant and high-quality".

amelius• 10 years ago

Our belief is that if someone doesn’t like them, and they won’t click on them, any impressions served to them will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads to people who won’t click on them harms campaign performance.

Okay, so why not then make ad-blockers unnecessary by providing a "don't show ads" option?

beachstartup• 10 years ago

because why would they do extra work when the users are already doing it, to good effect?

jc4p• 10 years ago

As stated in the full comment thread here we limit ads for users above 200 reputation. That puts it right between "Vote down" at 125 reputation and "View close votes" at 250.

Funny enough, we often get asked to implement the opposite: http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/273653/229741

arama471• 10 years ago

People who use AdBlockers already have that button. Seriously, they have very non-intrusive ads; If you want to block those you'll definitive be wanting to block others.

People on SO can be reasonably expected to know how to get that button (i.e. can you google how to install AdBlock).

ferrari8608• 10 years ago

Some web sites have this option, but you have to pay for it. I believe that is a fair compromise. If the site is worth it, I'll donate. If not, ublock stays on, and then it won't really bother me if they go under having relied solely on advertising to stay afloat.

donretag2• 10 years ago

StackOverflow does not have to pay editors, they have users that contribute for free. Somewhat tacky of SO to not mention this fact.

Just like traditional writers have publishing statistics, online writers use analytics to calculate how much reach their pieces have. It is sad, but writers count on pageviews, which is why you see many clickbait titles.

EGreg• 10 years ago

And in the near future why should someone EMPLOY writers if people are willing to do it for free, and collaborate using software? Serious question.

donretag2• 10 years ago

Huffington Post does "employ" writers that work for free. It is called exposure! I wonder what HufPo's stand on adblock is.

nemothekid• 10 years ago

A lot of people write books for free, in most cases, they aren't worth reading.

manigandham2• 10 years ago

Because the quality of the output is directly related to it. Employing writers means they can remain objective and focus on what they actual do - writing. It also includes the other support costs they would need (for example in doing investigative work). You're not going to have the same kind of journalism without compensation.

stevesearer5• 10 years ago

One of the things I've started doing is having a generic title for a post/article on the actual website (Facebook Offices - Menlo Park) and then using a more editorialized title for social media sharing (Tour of Facebook's Sprawling Menlo Park Campus).

Because I do all of the editing on the site, I remember a time when I just felt hollow trying to editorialize every post title published when some just didn't need to have any particular aspect of them highlighted.

falcolas2• 10 years ago

But they do have to employ moderators, admins, marketing, sales, software developers, IT... as well as paying for hosting, bandwidth, office space, equipment...

What does missing one specific class of employees really matter in the broader scope?

dredmorbius2• 10 years ago

Good creative content is difficult to incentivise for.

Case in point: SO incentivises for it without payment. Largely through providing an "interesting things to work on" dynamic, with rapid review and improvement of naff responses.

But answers to technical problems (many quite trivial) are a different class than, say, deep investigative reporting, or solving really hard technical problems.

On that last, there's an essay written a few years back on how the current iteration of the Internet seems to incentivise for trivial things, featured on HN. I'll see if I can't track it down.

(See what you just incentivised me to do there?)

teh_klev• 10 years ago

But they do have to employ moderators

Nit-pick...."moderators" (the ones with the diamonds next to their names) are not employees, they're elected from the community and are unpaid volunteers (I used to be one on SO). There are staff members who have mod diamonds, but they're employed to do other things such as development, community management etc.

Houshalter• 10 years ago

Because those things are at different scales. I'm sure there are thousands of hours put into IT and moderation, but there are millions of hours put into content creation. The value of SO almost entirely comes from unpaid volunteers who produce the actual content.

I'm not trying to imply that this is morally wrong. I think parent comment is just trying to say that it puts them into an entirely different class of websites than journalism. They can afford to run on less ad revenue, because the amount of content they produce per employee is much higher.

quadrangle2• 10 years ago

I guess that we, as a society, could all contribute valuable information and things, and then the overhead will be less and the need for obnoxious ads less. It's a win for everyone. Best example is Wikimedia with zero ads at all.

fascinated• 10 years ago

I thought the actual reason they don't care is that the Careers program brings in much more revenue?

frandroid• 10 years ago

Let's see what happens when ad blockers block that content.

vinceguidry• 10 years ago

The problem with selectively un-blocking individual sites is that it poses a management problem, plus it wouldn't take many bad ads to come through to cause me to go back to just blocking everything.

I'm sorry, but this really is a case of "this is why we can't have nice things." I would rather give up all premium Internet content than to have to actually manage the problem or any of the purported solutions to the problem.

YouTube would be the hardest to give up, but most of my favorite producers have Patreons and their own video-hosting sites anyway, and I might even be able to eke out a profit helping the rest move too if they needed it. I can simply curate individual "super-premium" content creators and patronize them, leaving the likes of Wired and WSJ to their fates.

I already use TheBrowser and use their micro-payment service, but I only ever put $5 on it, there just isn't that many paid articles. The content industry is extremely insistent on forcing advertising on me, sorry but no. Especially for high-volume news sites, the PITA factor far outweighs whatever insight I get from the news articles themselves.

XorNot• 10 years ago

The value problem: when I think critically about it, the fact I visit a site doesn't really mean I couldn't function without it. It's disposable.

a3n• 10 years ago

Most sites that have ads are really just entertainment for me, even news. And there's lots of other entertainment.

It would be a shame if $FAVORITE were to disappear, they have great journalists, but I don't read $FAVORITE regularly, so if I never see a link for it on HN I probably won't remember it existed.

I pay for three outlets: NYT, Economist, Guardian. Nothing else in the world has seemed important enough for me to pay for it, and I won't miss them if I'm blocked.

comex• 10 years ago

Note that YouTube now has YouTube Red which does get rid of all ads.

blakeyrat4• 10 years ago

... but it ensures your money goes to only the top tier of YouTube creators, and not the people who made the videos you enjoy. (Unless you only enjoy the top tier of creators, that is.) I hope you like PewDiePie, because if you're paying for Red, that's where the money's going.

I would never even consider subscribing to Red until YouTube promises that the fee you spend goes to the creators you actually watch.

ohthehugemanate• 10 years ago

The management problem is why ad block plus started their acceptable ads initiative. Websites register with ad block as having acceptable ads only, and ad block puts the sites on your whitelist automatically.... And of course, periodically verifies the website is still following the rules. There's a registration fee for organizations that get more than 10 million ad impressions per month on browsers with adblock installed. The ad industry calls it extortion.

jxramos• 10 years ago

Kudos to StackOverflow! Especially the sentiment recognizing "scantily-clad women selling flight deals" as a low quality ad. I'm a married man, I don't need that sort of noise and nonsense in my life. This blog further deepens my loyalty to the StackOverflow community.

Joof• 10 years ago

Stack overflow has an interesting difference to most websites: their users provide their content. Users that run ad-block are still potentially valuable.

gwbas1c• 10 years ago

Honestly, I never wanted to enable ad-blockers. I started doing it because of ads that flash, make noise, slow down the site, obscure content, ect, ect.

I really wish ad-blockers would default to an "block annoying ads only" mode; or some kind of whitelist mode; or even some way to crowdsource so that only annoying ads get blocked.

stevesearer5• 10 years ago

I make my living from advertisements but have had to enable blockers on certain sites which are not just aesthetically unusable but actually unusable because of ads. I'm talking to you Bon Appetit and Epicurious!

massysett2• 10 years ago

I just have stopped visiting sites with annoying ads like that. Which really means I have stopped visiting a lot of the free Web.

News? Economist and NY Times. Recipes? Cooks Illustrated.

Of course the Web is still useful to buy things from a merchant; there, the site obviously has no incentive to be annoying. And sometimes for free stuff it's better to go to the site of someone who is already selling you something. You mention Bon Appetit and Epicurious. If you want free recipes, go to food manufacturer's website or to a grocery store's website. They are loaded with free recipes and there are no annoying ads...of course, the whole site is an ad. But it has what you need.

I understand if sites have a business model that needs annoying ads. I just don't visit them. It seems hypocritical to me to visit the site while not respecting its business model, especially when there are other sites out there whose business model is more aligned with your needs. I would rather support them with my money or clicks rather than visiting annoying places and then installing more software to suppress annoyances.

asddddd• 10 years ago

I really wish ad-blockers would default to an "block annoying ads only" mode; or some kind of whitelist mode; or even some way to crowdsource so that only annoying ads get blocked.

This is what ABP attempted to do, and the reason why you see people advocating forks or alternative adblockers these days.

shkkmo4• 10 years ago

Can I suggest https://www.eff.org/privacybadger?

It selectively blocks add based on if they are tracking you, but I would imagine that most annoying adds are tracking you. You can also individually re-enable scripts/cookies on a third party domain per site basis.

makecheck• 10 years ago

I love what Daring Fireball does; simply a paragraph describing some sponsor: who they are and what they do. I find myself reading it every time and even being interested. I can say with 100% certainty that I have never had that reaction to any "traditional" ad however.

wingerlang• 10 years ago

Possibly because you are "loyal" and respect the blog author, I doubt websites/blogs that are not of this caliber would get away with it.

teambob• 10 years ago

Does Stack Overflow have ads? I have been running ad blockers since they started

darkstar999• 10 years ago

You could read the article to find out. It's literally in the first sentence.

lamontcg• 10 years ago

"Our belief is that if someone doesn’t like them, and they won’t click on them, any impressions served to them will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads to people who won’t click on them harms campaign performance."

^^^ so much this.

there's this implied assumption that everyone using an adblocker is lost revenue, but a lot of that is going to be shitty ad impressions that never lead to clicks.

like it or not, advertisers can't actually put a gun to my head and force me to click on an ad and buy anything.

even if its a targeted ad that manages to engage me (coincidentally this did actually happen this morning with an ad from one of the rare newsletters that i've allowed to be sent to my e-mail inbox) then it probably doesn't work the way with me that advertisers want it to. i managed to find a product that i was interested in, but it was too expensive for me. so i did a "brandX vs ..." search on google to find brandY and now i've bookmarked the product their competition sells which seems to be more in line with my budget...

if you want to 'game' my purchasing habits you'd be better off not advertising at all in the classical sense, but instead send your product to review sites and/or just buy reviews in order to saturate google results. however, when all i see is obviously bought off review sites i'll go looking for relevant forums and look for user threads. by far the best thing there is to have a social media presence and have a staffer that surfs through forum sites and answers questions.

plus, you know, just have a good product for a good price to get people talking well about it... i realize that's some fucking crazytalk there though...

chmullig• 10 years ago

Web conversations like this are terrible. Clicks are a very small part of what advertisers are buying, even if that's how it's measured. Just like sometimes when you're at a cafe you buy a cup of coffee, but actually what you want is the nice space to work and an internet connection for a couple hours.

(Some) advertisers are actually smart. They do extensive, scientific research around attribution and effectiveness. Even if you don't click on ads, you're influenced by them (yes, you, too). They can track that, and it's a large part of what they're paying for. Just like TV ads.

rhino369• 10 years ago

Most advertising is just general brand awareness. They don't need you to click or to consciously decide "hey that looks cool."

They want you to be standing in the soda isle of the grocery store when you are going to a party and someone asked you to pick up a drink. You don't have a strong preference. But you buy Coke because you know it. Just knowing about it is a huge advantage.

That's why a lot of advertising is priced in "per impression."

A lot of people will claim advertising has no effect on them, but that's BS. It does.

So using adblockers costs the website roughly .2 cents per ad impression.

I don't think you have some moral duty to view the ads, but they don't have some duty to give you a free website either.

massysett2• 10 years ago

This stuff works. Sometimes it seems to me that TV ads must be ineffective. Unlike a Web ad there is no direct link between the ad and a buy. So why does the advertiser bother?

Then I was buying life insurance. So I go to some lead generation website. I see a whole bunch of companies I had never heard of. Then I see Prudential. Rock. I see Metlife. Snoopy. I see ING. They sponsored the NYC Marathon that I ran in.

I didn't get Metlife, so much for Snoopy...but I didn't get a company I had never heard of either. For a few I said "never heard of them" and for others I'm sure my eye just skipped right over them.

Ads work and I bet they do work even on people who say "ads NEVER work on me." Really? When you are buying a new product, all the ad impressions you have had make absolutely NO difference? Are you sure?

kbart• 10 years ago

"Most advertising is just general brand awareness... you buy Coke because you know it"

Very much true. I worked in a grocery store during my school summer and even though I didn't watch TV, I could know what products were being advertised on it just by watching people's buying habits. I even did a test -- named some products to my friend that watched TV and it was spot on.

mirimir• 10 years ago

That also strikes me as insightful. Even if I were forced to view ads, I would never click on them. Or even hover. If it's something that interests me, I might search in a different window. Basically, I just don't trust ads.

yeukhon• 10 years ago

The ads are targeting at the right audience. They are not accepting ads selling baby toys or the next movie discount. That's a huge difference.

hardwaresofton• 10 years ago

Sure wish this post covered the financial impact of these decisions more thoroughly.

vuldin• 10 years ago

"At this point, it’s pretty clear that ad blocking is a big deal. A recent study suggesting the advertising industry is set to lose over $22 billion in 2015 alone as a result of ad blockers is setting off alarm bells. That is a LOT of money."

This line of thinking makes me livid. They aren't losing money if they never were entitled to it in the first place. Get used to seeing my adblock, and if you or anyone else is interested in getting any money from me, then your only hope is to focus your efforts on coming up with an awesome product.

cbd1984• 10 years ago

One of the things ad-blocking will force people to reconsider is deals of the form "Person A pays Person B for the time and attention of completely unrelated Person C, who is not only completely unrelated to A and B but who is not even known to them beyond the most generic statistical demographic concepts."

There's obviously nothing legally wrong with that contract, we're just forcing a re-evaluation of the moral rights Person A has over Person C given the above transaction.

irascible• 10 years ago

And importantly.. add servers brought this on themselves. If they had catered to users and given them the tools they needed to tailor their experience, they wouldn't be in the situation they are now. Salty tears...

bluedino• 10 years ago

> Bret and the ad server team dug in and investigated screen size of every user across the Stack Exchange network and concluded that only about 2% of users would be affected by the change.

While no users might have cared, the meta thread was pretty controversial.

http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/272617/178809

voltagex_2• 10 years ago

Is there any point to running ads on a small site / blog any more?

It's a lot of work to curate your average stream of garbage coming from AdSense etc. I really want to find a targetted ad network from a smaller company who might actually care about individual customers (if anyone knows such an ad network for {food,cooking,photography,travel,restaurants,health} let me know).

glossyscr• 10 years ago

Wait until Adblock blocks your 'Jobs near you' ad and your other job ad links which is StackOverflows main revenue stream—paired with 40% Adblock desktop users.

And you tell us you do not care?

lyschoening• 10 years ago

Most of StackOverflow's income comes from their job postings. When I posted a job on SO a year ago, I asked them about Ad blockers. The salesperson told me confidently that they were not concerned because only 'around 5% of visitors' or some other small number used an Ad blocker.

I was, and still am, quite sceptical about that claim. (At any rate, I don't know how to feel about a web developer who does not use an Ad blocker in this day and age.) It began to make more sense to me recently when the Jobs section was added to the SO front page and the new CV was introduced: Their approach now is to help developers and employers actively look up ads/CVs when they are in need of them.

kelnos• 10 years ago

It's really great to see that people are paying attention to the problem of low-quality ads.

But I don't want to see ads. Of any quality level, high or low. Ever. I will never turn off my ad blocker, for any site.

I just don't want my day-to-day to be influenced by random companies trying to sell me things. Certainly, I can't avoid it: I live in a city, and walk everywhere I can, and it's impossible to avoid seeing billboards and the like. If I could wear a pair of contact lenses that would blank out real-world advertising, I would. But online ads I can avoid.

I buy things when I want to. If I feel that I have a specific want or need for something, I'll seek it out, and select the brand and model based on research pulled from the most unbiased sources that I can find. Perfect? No, of course not. But advertising is an abomination.

Drakim• 10 years ago

I feel that there is this collective idea that since you can't block out advertising from your vision while walking around, then you shouldn't be able to block advertising online either. As if our computers are letting us cheat the "natural order" by having ad block.

ttctciyf• 10 years ago

I share the dislike of and militancy against ads evinced by some of the posts here.

I started reading the piece thinking "Oh, another marketing guy who's drunk the 'relevant ads are good for people and everyone apart from a few contrarians really likes them' kool-aid.

So I was surprised to read what seems to be a rare example of sane thinking in an advertising person:

  The truth is: we don’t care if our users use ad blockers on Stack Overflow.
  More accurately: we hope that they won’t, but we understand that
  some people just don’t like ads. Our belief is that if someone doesn’t
  like them, and they won’t click on them, any impressions served to them
  will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads to people who won’t click on
  them harms campaign performance.

Yes! I will never click on an ad that somehow gets past my ad-blocking stuff, it is just a big fat waste of money serving me the ad that I will never click on.

Isn't it a bigger waste of money, though, serving me the page that will never monetize because I will never click on the ads?

Let's assume that the only reason for the existence of the site is to make money. Then by blocking ads, I'm signaling my intent to frustrate this purpose. Shouldn't the site just not serve me any pages at all since my intent is clear?

Interestingly, the site-owner's view of the intrinsic (i.e. non-monetary) value of their site figures into this calculation, it seems.

If the site is (at one extreme) disposable click-bait with no substantial content that can't be found at a dozen similar sites, then it's a reasonable assumption that if you disable access for ad-blocking users, they'll just go and get their meaningless content elsewhere rather than enable ads. Since their ad-blocking ways are a good indicator that even if they enabled ads for whatever reason, they'd probably never click on the ads anyhow, it makes economic sense in this case to just dispense with the users.

At the other extreme, if your site is (let's say) a premier source of useful information in some sizable field, it's a good bet that if you force ad-blocking users to enable ads they will often continue to visit your site, either participating in an ad-blocking arms-race that makes it increasingly expensive for you to circumvent the blocking, or capitulating by loading the ads but just never, ever, clicking on them, costing you more money either way.

So even from a purely financial POV, the strategy of just not caring about ad-blocking looks like a win, without having to invoke the nobler-but-woolier considerations about wanting to "make the world a better place for developers."

Other ad-ops people in charge of intrinsically valuable web estate would do well to follow SO's thinking, IMO!

captainmuon• 10 years ago

Ad Blockers wouldn't matter so much if

a) people would self-host ads or b) the target of the ad would host them (but not a third party). You could randomize ad source code and layout such that an ad blocker would have no chance removing it.

An alternative would be c) if there was much more diversity on the advertising market, and every site would serve ads from multiple competing agencies (with different formats and different URLs). This would also make it harder to block, and also make it harder for advertising agencies to create profiles (one of many reasons people block ads).

vitd• 10 years ago

Can anyone explain this quote to me? They say:

we permit users to downvote or close ads that they don’t like.

Before I used an ad blocker, I noticed that they had a thumbs up/thumbs down icon you could click and choose from why you didn't like the ad. I did this literally dozens to hundreds of times on the same "Azure" ad, and it never stopped showing up until I installed an ad blocker. Is that what he's referring to? If not, what does he mean?

Why Stack Overflow Doesn’t Care About Ad Blockers

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