I generally adblock everything (adblock plus + filterset.G), with a few exceptions, for example, bit-tech (the site even looks a bit empty without them :S). I don't really mind ads that have something to do with the theme of the site, but the flashy, epilepsy-inducing stuff just drives me crazy. I never click on ads, UK & other foreign ads mean absolutely nothing to me in croatia.
To the best of my understanding (which is based purely on my understanding of AdSense's terms - which might be faulty), revenue generated is a hybrid of impressions as well as clicks - i.e. a view makes you x amount, a click makes you y amount... even though that does amount to very little indeed (in the case of AdSense). i know of a site, for example which gets a fair bit (not a boatload, mind) of traffic - round about 32000 page views a month, and i know that that site makes about 15USD a month MAX based on AdSense... that's not a whole lot... I, for my part, don't adblock for the simple reason that if i were to own a site that's paid for by advertising (which at present i don't), i'd want users who don't adblock. Bandwidth might be getting cheaper, but someone still needs to pay for it. tit for tat, and such... i do know that there was a legal case that had users whining about not being able to visit their favourite site anymore after they had installed ad blocking software... hence me thinking about it in the first place...
There's an easy reality check: What if a large majority of people block ads? A commercial site will have the options of charging its viewers or making its advertising near-impossible to block - images, product placement, whatever it takes. But in the meantime the Law of the Commons applies - ad blocking benefits each individual user so sod the rest. I did point out somewhere else that Firefox users are the selfish surfers - in the most popular extensions are ones designed to either block advertising or waste a site's bandwidth. If you object to porn advertising or fear malware, it's easy to get a blacklist Hosts file.
Advertising on bit-tech.net for the most part is sold on a CPM: cost per '000 impressions. Not CPC cost per click. We don't get any extra revenue from people clicking on our adverts. However it does help to encourage advertisers to continue to support bit-tech if we can say "look we sent X number of people to your site / landing page / reseller" at the end of each month.
I've used Flashblock for years, never tried specifically Adblock. Flashblock is handy for me, at first I used it because it meant I didn't have to wait while stupid flash-ads downloaded when I could actually be viewing some useful content. It's also handy for Youtube, as I can open tabs but choose when to load the video. Reading this thread, I noticed that of the three ads on this page, two are flash and one is a gif - is that always the case? And I can now say that bit-tech is the first site I've added to my whitelist for Flashblock. Well done. Some of the adverts are interesting... and some are just amusing (lols, 8600GT).
The web hoster's accusation is flawed. If every user accessing their site blocked and ignored the adverts, the host would still get the money from the advertisers. The advertisers wouldn't suddenly perk up and say, "hey! you let people use adblock! We're not using your space anymore!" So they're really just being piggish snobs if they insist their users view the adverts, unless their advertising clients are psychic or something.
boiled - partially true... i know for example that if i visit the page i mentioned above (from the office), it will NOT load the ads. It'll just block the entire content of the DIV - therefore, the advertisers never get a hit, and therefore, the host would NOT get paid. Especially on a CPM schema.
Personally I hate anything that moves or flashes, even the ones bit-tech. However bit-tech is white listed as are a couple of other sites, and I have no problem saying that I hate 99% of web adavertising as it is either irrelivent to me or the site or overly tries to get my attention.
I have adblock pro, noscript etc.... it doesn't block bit-techs adverts, and as they are unobtrusive i have no reason to block them as they don't mask content or distract me from what i do. I believe advertising is a bit misguided when people start using popups etc... to detract from the user experience of the website. makes me rage it does.
The sort of people who use adblock aren't going to click on adverts anyway, regardless of if they are not downloaded, downloaded but not displayed, or displayed. (The logic being that if you hate adverts, you won't drive revenue to the people responsible). Viewy-only adverts are - apparently I was wrong about this - different because they're passive. (They still use bandwidth, however.) If websites start detecting if ad images were downloaded and using it as a way to block people using ABP, then the ABP developers will just change the way ABP works so that it downloads the ads but just doesn't display them. Or, if they don't, someone else will write an extension which does. If you do know someone personally who has a website which relies on advertising revenue, it's no huge deal to turn off ABP and click through their ads once in a while. I use ABP on all sites - for reasons other than just disliking adverts. Flash adverts SUCK BORLS: adverts should not be sized in the hundreds of kilobytes for starters, and secondly linux flash support also sucks borls, so I don't like having 50% cpu usage while, say, doing nothing more than reading a thread on bit tech. I know that's a fairly lame excuse and one which ideally shouldn't exist, but until there's good flash support they just have to go. PS: I'm not a complete scrooge so I did just whitelist gif|jpeg|png adds from bit-tech. No flash though - sorry
Well as advertising on the web became "serious", the amount of money being spent increased, and it moved to a much more traditional (read: feasible and measurable) way of doing things - you book impressions. Branding (etc) as others have said is far more important. A click is just icing on the cake, and obviously if, like Hiren said, we can boast a good amount of clicks generated, it's more likely to guarantee us further business. So yes, that's exactly what we're saying - bit-tech doesn't make a single penny more (or less) if you click (or don't click) on ads. If you block our ads, we serve them more slowly, thus reducing our inventory and ultimately reducing the amount of impressions we can sell. That is why blocking ads hurts us and other websites. Adsense is an exception - it differs depending on what your relationship with google is. Once you've got a good amount of traffic it can even be purely CPM. Re. flash & gif: it depends. And thanks I'm not sure what to make of this You're so completely and utterly wrong - please just read the rest of the thread. Just more proof of what I said earlier - 99% of people believe that blocking ads doesn't harm anyone.
Alright I just edited having realised that while you were writing I still don't see why I should download a 200+kb 'shoot the ducks' advert (that isn't directed at bit-tech). If I do that a few times virgin media cap me I have to say CPM does explain why advertising is, in a lot of cases, less like it used to be (banner at the top and bottom of page e.g. on free hosting) and more "let's put 500 adverts right in the middle of the page". Fine, that gets you 'impressions' but it is substantially more annoying and likely to get blocked. Worst offenders being 'IT professional' sites with "Windows Server > Linux" ads in the flow of the page with text wrapped around them, conference adds in vertical bars down the side of the page 'sponsored gaps' leading to 'after the jump'. Grrr! Given what you said, I want an ad block plus type-whatsit that allows ONE non-flash 'impression' per page view. I don't think you can do that with current ABP rules though.
The one for the 8400GS was even funnier, offering (someting like) "The frame rates you have always wanted"! I used adblock for a bit on my old laptop but only on some adverts. Simply because the fancy flash ones completely killed it, two tabs of bit-tech with those shiney BFG-tech adverts and my computer was unusable. The same want for some of the ones on TrustedReviews. Now I am no longer using that, I have stopped using adblock for the reasons above. Bit-tech doesn't have too many annoying flashing adverts (though the one for the corsair HX1000 is just starting to get annoying on the left) so I don't mind too much. Please please don't start using the text ones that pop up a little thing when you accidentally whizz past them one a page and stop you from reading what is underneath them - they really are incredibly annoying.
Don't use adblock, never really have until a while ago, didn't really get into using it to much, and adverts have never bothered me before ( except the flashy, noisy or the OH LOOK IM BLOCKING THE PAGE CONTENT ones ),of which most of the time i don't bother returning to that website. Most sites i do use have relevant adverts, this is much better as its something i'm more interested in anyway! BT for example ran a SPORE advert, and i want that game. Relevant? Yes.
I've been running Adblock and an automated filterset for quite some time, because it makes my browsing so much more pleasant. I have Bit-Tech whitelisted, as well as a few other pages I visit frequently, but my default behavior is to block everything. This is primarily because so many ads these days are animated and distracting. I'm willing to tolerate simple gif-style animations for pages I support, but if you go too far beyond that my vengeance is swift: Even if I've whitelisted a page in order to support it, the instant I hear audio or see highlighted-text context ads, the whole site is back on the blacklist. Those types of ads interfere with my ability to see the content, and that won't do. To be fair, if I blacklist a site for offensive ads, I probably ought to let the site know I'm displeased with their choice of advertising; if enough people took this type of action the overall annoyance level of ads might go down. Aside from my personal use, though, I've found AdBlock to be a very powerful security tool. Even switching to Firefox didn't fully insulate my family from loading up on spyware, but once I'd installed AdBlock their infection rate went through the floor. I think the issue is mostly the fake security warning type of ad, but I've long ago given up on training my parents in the complexities of the internet; blocking the ads saves me a fantastic amount of cleanup effort. EDIT: I should also say that if a site has the ability to accept PayPal donations, and I choose to block their ads, I'll generally feel compelled to make a contribution. Two of the sites I visit, Silent PC Review and Dan's Data, fall into the category of having exceptionally irritating ads but accepting donations.
The nature of the internet (ie. the way the page is rendered by the users machine) means that people are able to control the way they view web pages, and are able to change or remove stuff they don't like. If you don't like this idea, then you would be better off not publishing on the internet.
I'll only block ads if they interfere with the content or are just plain "in your face", the poker advertising and popunder ads etc. get blocked as wellhe Subtle advertising, as in it doesn't cover content, open a new window etc., is fine in my eyes and doesn't bother me in the slightest.
Any other sites running CPM ads, you mean. It generates 100% of the money on CPC ads. AdSense for example tends to be CPC (though if you've got enough traffic they'll show CPM ads too) - I've seen revenues of anything from a fraction of a cent to about $2.50 for a click on CPC ads. I know that Bit charges per impression at least as of a couple of years ago (and what the rates are) having looked into advertising on the site for a business that didn't end up panning out. Anyways, I generally block ads but whitelist sites that I frequent. There are enough sleazeballs trying to make a quick buck with popunders and all of that crap but I'm not bothered by it. Anecdotally, most of the automated ads (Google, etc) don't seem that well targeted. Here of course we get stuff for video cards, games, motherboards, etc which is right on the mark; except on Google Custom Search where the admin has weighted certain keywords, most of the Adsense ads are way off the mark even if they pay out fairly well on CPC ads. Right now I'm seeing stuff here for radio amplifiers and in-wall speakers - somewhat geeky, but pretty off-topic given the thread anyways, which is to say that it's ok for the domain but not so much for the page.
I have to agree with this. It's very much like piracy in that it can be done and therefore will. It may not be right, but it's also beyond the control of the publisher as to how the viewer uses their site. I don't use FF, but i do make it a point to NOT purchase anything from an ad. If I see an ad for a product i think i might like, I'll go buy it on ebay or somewhere else so as to not encourage advertising. My more immediate problem is that some of the ads on Bit trip the "anti phishing" filter on the computers at work and so i can't view some threads until the ads rotate again.
