Why Ad Blocking is Devastating to the Sites You Love
Several of MAP’s staffers have installed ad blockers on their Internet browsers, and many readers of RoadMAP have probably done so as well. Here comes the Editor In Chief of RoadMAP’s favorite tech site, Ars Technica, begging all of us not to use our ad blockers because it threatens to kill off free content on the Internet. (By the way, Ars is hardly a hand-to-mouth startup. It is owned by Conde Nast, which also owns The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and other major magazines. This plea has forced RoadMAP to rethink its practice.
Why Ad Blocking is Devastating to the Sites You Love
Did you know that blocking ads truly hurts the websites you visit? We recently learned that many of our readers did not know this, so I’m going to explain why.
There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won’t hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis. If you have an ad blocker running, and you load 10 pages on the site, you consume resources from us (bandwidth being only one of them), but provide us with no revenue. Because we are a technology site, we have a very large base of ad blockers. Imagine running a restaurant where 40% of the people who came and ate didn’t pay. In a way, that’s what ad blocking is doing to us. Just like a restaurant, we have to pay to staff, we have to pay for resources, and we have to pay when people consume those resources. The difference, of course, is that our visitors don’t pay us directly but indirectly by viewing advertising. (Although a few thousand of you are subscribers, and we thank you all very, very much!)
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