The ads aren't there purely to annoy people, they're there to support the content you'd otherwise pay for. The idea of paying them instead of getting ads is also a way to support that content.
It can also be seen as acting like the mob. "It'd be a shame if your nice clean web page suddenly got ruined with ads. You know, we can keep that from happening for a price." No thanks. I'll continue to block ads and not be tracked and have my internet load faster.
OK, then modify the statement, but use the same mobster voice: "It would be a shame if your browser got overloaded with pop-overs, malware and javascript trackers. You know, we can keep that from happening for a price."
Pretend there is a Museum. It's free to the public with a suggested donation. You go there every weekend because of it's interesting collection of $thing. You never pay the suggested donation.
Is this ethical? It's not illegal. But that isn't the question.
Not a good analogy. If there was a donation mechanism, many people might choose to pay it. I contribute to several sites via Patreon, for instance.
But if every time you visit the museum someone follows you around talking in your ear about the products available in the gift shop, you might choose not to go, or (if the content is interesting enough) you might start wearing headphones or earplugs and go anyway.
So a paywall, except it's intentionally obnoxious/dangerous to the very people it's trying to get to pay them money? I don't think this is a realistic thing to worry about.
Now that's an interesting question. I wonder if we'll start seeing people try to use explicit copyright licenses to say that your license is revoked if you use an ad blocker. Not sure what that'd look like.
Go for it, but you're only able to have your cake and eat it too because of people who view ads. If I were you, I'd keep quiet and encourage others to view ads, otherwise content creators will have to either quit or throw up paywalls.
> otherwise content creators will have to either quit or throw up paywalls
There are other categories of content creators who don't expect payment.
For example I contribute data to Flightradar24. In return they provide me with an ad-less experience because, like forum websites, their very existence depends on user contributions.
Other people just run websites for fun and education and pay for it willingly out of their pocket. I had to step-up to a 200GB package from my ISP for that reason. No-one paid towards my costs and I don't expect anyone to do so.
ads stopped being pay-per-impression around 2001 or so. For actual money to flow, people need to click on ads. For the advertisers to want to spend money, people need to not just click on the ads but also convert (aka, go to the site and order something).
Why does this matter? If the total ad space expands, and therefore the number of ad views increases, people will still buy about the same amount of products they bought before, which means the total advertising revenue of all the sites will also still be the same.
What we'd need would be an ad blocker that allows us, at regular times, to go to a special page, get a list of all the ads, and click on some of them in a quiet moment where they don't interfere with site content. And of course all of these clicks would have to count as "organic" non-fraudulent clicks.
A clearer way to write this would be, pay-per-impression stopped being the default (or only) way of doing business sometime between 1999-2001. After a brief period where
ads were predominantly text-based, ad inflation brought
graphical ads and CPM back and nowadays can do CPC as well
as CPM or CPA (cost per acquisition) links:
https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2472725?hl=en&ref_...
But don't let your clear picture of ad spending make you ignore the fundamental fact: there's no basic relation between ad views and advertising spending. More buzzfeeds
mean that there will be more ads, but not more advertising
dollars, and quality/expensive sites suffer just as heavily
from the ad inflation driven by cheap content sites as they suffer from the 20-30% of people using ad blockers.
Practically all of the advertising on the internet is purchased on per impression basis. It falls into 2 categories:
1) Advertisers paying straight per mille i.e. mr. Proper, Coca-Cola, Lays, etc. Direct outcomes are secondary to them (at best). This is the ovewhelming majority of the display ad spend. Yes, you read that right. The majority of the online ad spend does not care about sales on a website.
2) CPC based ads (ala adwords). Although you are charged per click, this is primarily because it is easier to explain to you. At the end of the day, there are back end calculations in google (the most famous one being called "quality score"), which transform per-click to per-mille. The reason for that is as simple as supply and demand.
This is true for all publishers who sell on CPC. They calculate how much they make per 1000 impressions and calibrate the CPCs towards balanced equilibrium that will extract the most money out of the ad buyers. Publishers deal with visits and they need to know how much they make per visit.
I made my initial comment just to see where crybabies will go with their nonsense and couch expertise. Response as expected...
Between virtualization, 16-core CPU's, and "the cloud", businesses have been replacing servers at a 1:10 ratio. Good for businesses that buy servers, bad for companies that sell servers like Dell and HP.
