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!)

“My argument is simple: blocking ads can be devastating to the
sites you love. I am not making an argument that blocking ads is a
form of stealing, or is immoral, or unethical, or makes someone the
son of the devil. It can result in people losing their jobs, it can
result in less content on any given site, and it definitely can
affect the quality of content. It can also put sites into a real
advertising death spin. As ad revenues go down, many sites are
lured into running advertising of a truly questionable nature.
We’ve all seen it happen.”

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