IMO, this is the biggest issue facing ad providers today.
I get the anti-ad blocker complaints - there are a lot of sites that depend entirely upon advertising revenue for their continued existence. And this isn't just crappy blogmills - even a company like the New York Times doesn't make enough money from subscriptions alone to continue operating without advertising of some sort.
Maybe there's a different model out there but as far as I'm aware no-one has found it yet, and in the mean time I'm quite prepared to tolerate advertising on web sites in return for the content I get. I'll even tolerate a pre-roll ad or a full-screen takeover before I get to a page every now and then - but there's a line. The mild end of it (for me) is ads clearly intended to make you click by accident, and the severe end of it is malware like this. And in my experience it's on the rise.
By all means implore your users to turn off their ad blockers. But clean house first and make sure you know what you're serving. The real problem is that it's borderline impossible for anyone to do so, given how many reseller networks exist out there these days. I often see people say that sites should arrange and sell their own advertising - but the reality is there's no money in it. Selling yourself out to the Google ad behemoth is often the only way out.
I think most people, with a little education, are reasonable when it comes to ads. I know I was. Most of my computers didn't block ads or scripts. You can try to be nice but the ad makers have escalated things to the point that you have to respond. It's like content creators these days are so upset about ad-blocking that they feel they have to lash out with ads at the people that don't block. I went to some random Linux Q&A forum and had to force-quit my browser because the ads brought the browser to a standstill; all tabs were frozen. I consider ads that crash or force me to close my browser as an act of violence. Nobody in their right mind wants to subject themselves to that, regardless of their opinion of ad-blocking.
"Maybe there's a different model out there but as far as I'm aware no-one has found it yet"
Sure they have. Sites just need to host the ads natively instead of outsourcing that responsibility. But they don't want to do that, because they don't want to take on that responsibility.
This is how my site works and it works well. In theory I might be able to make a bit more via an ad network, but I like treating my site like a magazine and have highly relevant and high-quality ads.
Two questions: how much time do you spend selling/negotiating with advertisers? And you say you could earn more from a network: have you researched at all exactly how much more?
Naively, it seems that maybe advertisers would pay you more because 100% of the visitors to your site are relevant to their products (but admittedly I'm out of my realm of expertise).
It is difficult to say how much time I spend on that side of things since it has been built up over time and have pretty high advertiser loyalty - total guess, but maybe 5-20% depending on the time of year. Most of my time is spent acquiring, editing, and categorizing content as well as adding new features to the site.
I haven't really done much research into the various networks, but I do get sales pitches from time to time. My first question is always wondering which advertisers using the network are relevant to my readers (almost always the answer is none). Plus at this point I have a direct relationship with marketing departments, so there isn't really a need for a middleman.
This is more or less the old print model - take a topic, create quality content, take money from very specific relevant advertisers.
It's such an obvious model that it's amazing the ad industry hasn't understood how well it works. Instead they persist in using crappy non-functional trackers and ad blocker blockers and all kinds of other bullshit techniques - because apparently they'd rather game readers than provide something good and useful.
Postscript: a minor bug. I'm using OS X Chrome, and the ad bar keeps twitching when I reach the end and try to scroll down further.
Yeah, I basically think about the site as being a magazine with enhanced features. Unfortunately news sites like CNN don't have a narrow audience and therefore use technology to slice and dice the visitors into narrow groups.
Is that scroll bug on all pages with the ad sidebar? Do you run any script blockers?
I'll second `oaktowner's comment: the adds fit right in. They fit in naturally and it feels curated. If this is what we were immersed in, web ads would be a much more relevant. the ads don't smack you and stand out as ADS! And instead blend in nicely.
I genuinely wondered if those were even advertisements. They look professional, pretty and placed well. Your site is a lesson for the entire advertising industry. It is not often that I see an advert and do not immediately go to edit my Privoxy blocking lists.
The thing that astounds me is that Forbes and most magazines would never not take the option to curate the ads in their print magazines. You think Forbes would let a "one weird trick..." ad anywhere near their print magazine? (Caveat: perhaps they do now, I've not picked up a print copy of Forbes in years.) Back in the day when I would purchase ad space in a magazine, I'd deal directly with someone from that magazine's organization. My ads were always pretty bland, but I've heard of print magazines turning away ads.
But it looks like all bets are off when things go to the web, and even the most high-brow magazines take their web properties and make it look like the web equivalent to something next to the chewing gum at the grocery checkout stand.
IMHO, if content providers/content hosts are going so far, in some cases, as to threaten law suits about ad blocking, they're putting themselves on the hook for liability when ads served for them cause harm to visitors' systems. I have no idea if there's any legal precedent for that, but morally it seems like two sides to the same coin.
You make money by putting me at risk? We share that money (and more) if you actually harm me.
I'm imagining the ultimate approach will be server-side includes of raw content from the ad networks so that the ad content is served from the content server and not sent off to a 3rd party.
From a security standpoint this is horrifying because it means that attempts to sandbox ad javascript away from site javascript in the browser will become impossible, since the sandbox will tell the browser what to block.
I block javascript. I whitelist very few sites. Ads - like sites themselves - need to work without javascript. Then we can all get along. Running random, unsigned, untested, unwanted code from strangers on my own computer doesn't really work for me, thanks. No, I don't care if your business model depends on it. I'm more than happy for every single site which depends on advertising to go bust. There'll always be another news site, and those failing sites will have no impact on the social media, shopping, banking etc sites which comprise most of most people's surfing. Really, ad-blocking just isn't that big a deal; the fact that it's got people talking and having big players like Apple get involved really speaks volumes about the sheer, gross violation of trust that's gone on all this time, as well as how security is being taken much more seriously than ever before.
More importantly than hosting the ads natively is handling media sales themselves. I think offloading that work to ad networks and ad exchanges is the first step in giving up responsibility for what gets shown to a user/viewer.
That works for niche or locally scoped/focused sites. The problem is that Google & Facebook offer a one-stop shopping experience that advertisers like.
A company I founded, Publir, is working on a new model here -- well behaved ads for anonymous users, microsubscriptions via Stripe to eliminate ads client-side for devoted readers.
Turns out that eliminating ads in the client upon payment is actually quite difficult to do with good hygeine; ad networks are very sensitive to "fraud." Now that we have a good solution, we're pretty excited about it.
For a while now I've been thinking about something like this: once a month I put some amount of money in my "browser account". Maybe it's $25, or $10, maybe sometimes it's nothing at all. This money gets automatically distributed to the sites I visit, potentially subject to a white/black list that I control. Payments automated, cryptographically secure. I never see an ad or run ad-related JS. And the sites that I support get my patronage as directly as possible. Edit: oh, and somehow my privacy is magically preserved. Small detail. :-)
Maybe that's too close to the "public radio" model, and would never work at scale, but I'd pay for it.
The only thing I fear with this (Brave) is that it is gameable. Whenever you create a pot of money, it will be gamed. Someone will come up with the Brave equivalent of a "One weird trick slideshow!" to extract maximum dollars.
Subscriptions, however, are consumer-empowering. And everyone gets how they work. (Netflix, Prime, etc.)
Most cable networks always showed ads, other than the premium channels (hbo, sho, etc)... They used to show fewer ads though... and the shows are now, mostly slotted to 44 minutes of show (give or take), closer to 36 for reality TV. So the rest gets filled with ads.. because money.
>Maybe there's a different model out there but as far as I'm aware no-one has found it yet
You could try Google Contributor. It shows you pictures of cats instead of ads, and let's you give a couple pennies to the website. It's not 100% but it's something different.
For me, the breaking point were ads that expanded to fill the screen, or that autoplayed something loud. I hated searching a page for the little ad that was blasting me in the ears. Then, once you realize that seeing ads is actually a choice, why would you ever go back?
"We need you!" or "We're better now!" is a hard sell after all of that brutal, personal experience.
That sounds an awful lot like a You* Problem, not a Me Problem. If the only way your business can stay afloat is by peddling malware to unsuspecting users, your business deserves to fail.
It will be come a You problem when these sites cease to exist because they have no money. No, we're not anywhere near that stage yet, but that doesn't mean we can't talk about it.
I didn't mean to sound like I was disagreeing with you, just continuing the discussion.
> It will be come a You problem when these sites cease to exist because they have no money.
Nah. Like I said, whatever value they provide is not greater than the cost of the malware they distribute. Them going out of business would be a net-good for the world.
> whatever value they provide is not greater than the cost of the malware they distribute. Them going out of business would be a net-good for the world
That feels like a blanket statement. When we're talking about the free press going under because they aren't able to afford to keep running, that sounds a lot more like an Us problem than a You or Me problem. Yes, I realise that sounds hyperbolic, but...
To me this feels like a false dichotomy. There are business models other than "literally distributing malware" and the only reason they're not pursued is because distributing malware is currently profitable. We need to make that not the case so we can move on.
No, we're not talking about "the free press" going under. We're talking about news (and "news" and entertainment and…) sites that take money from malware pushers. Think about that.
If your news source is willing to take money from folks attacking your machine, what does that say about their trustworthiness? Sure, go on about the wall between church and state, or that it is the ad network and not blog, but there is a reason some of the larger corporations occasionally go on media buying sprees. I'm not sure that it is strictly impossible to be financially dependent on others and maintain a completely independent voice, but I can't think of an example.
It is a suboptimal situation. I get that publishers are ending up with horrible tradeoffs. At the same time, if faced with a close friend who has ebola, I'm going to be incredibly sympathetic while also keeping quarantine.
I also heard another complaint about my approach, which was that if I avoid sites like Forbes, why do I still need an ad blocker? And of course, the answer is that I rarely bump in to things or stumble, but still like guardrails on steps.
> It will be come a You problem when these sites cease to exist because they have no money. No, we're not anywhere near that stage yet, but that doesn't mean we can't talk about it.
At this point I'm willing to take the risk of there being less content on the web.
Here's an idea: Maybe they should try and find cheaper hosting[0] and solutions, rather than getting the reader to foot the bill for their (generally) crappy technical decisions.
Yeah, there's plenty of sneaky ways to host for dirt cheap. OVH, DigitalOcean and CloudFlare have really worked wonders for me. The hosting isn't usually the expense here though - it's reporters, photographers, etc. How do you pay that many people's salaries?
Answer is probably that you don't - these companies will probably fail and other companies that can get away with cheap hosting and staffing will hack together comparable things using amateurish content.
I'm fine with it. I just want them to die already so that alternatives will spring up more readily.
I like NFSN's approach, and they're cheap enough for small sites, but their hosting is incredibly expensive at any kind of scale. ($0.25/GB traffic, $1.00/GB/mo storage, plus various other miscellaneous fees.)
Is that true? Google made tons of money from ads that weren't even images, just text. If you really need data about the reader, the site can cooperate to send this stuff back. I see no excuse for allowing the ad buyer to provide anything besides text and images. Allowing third parties to embed code in your pages is completely irresponsible.
I'm willing enough to tolerate a moderate amount of ads on the page. This malware issue is a real problem though - I wouldn't know if an ad infected me with malware until it's already a big problem to deal with, possibly even including a ransomware infection. The only safe option is to block 'em all everywhere.
Since adsense is automatic, malware does sneak in from time to time. Typically, within a few hours and after a few reports it's fixed. That said, it's a long time since i 've had any complaints about malware / popups using adsense so presumably they have improved.
I get the anti-ad blocker complaints - there are a lot of sites that depend entirely upon advertising revenue for their continued existence. And this isn't just crappy blogmills - even a company like the New York Times doesn't make enough money from subscriptions alone to continue operating without advertising of some sort.
Maybe there's a different model out there but as far as I'm aware no-one has found it yet, and in the mean time I'm quite prepared to tolerate advertising on web sites in return for the content I get. I'll even tolerate a pre-roll ad or a full-screen takeover before I get to a page every now and then - but there's a line. The mild end of it (for me) is ads clearly intended to make you click by accident, and the severe end of it is malware like this. And in my experience it's on the rise.
By all means implore your users to turn off their ad blockers. But clean house first and make sure you know what you're serving. The real problem is that it's borderline impossible for anyone to do so, given how many reseller networks exist out there these days. I often see people say that sites should arrange and sell their own advertising - but the reality is there's no money in it. Selling yourself out to the Google ad behemoth is often the only way out.