Ad blockers will eventually do to the content industry what file sharing has done to the music industry: it will make it impossible to make a living at it unless you are part of a very large corporation, mostly because they have other businesses to subsidize the unprofitable content models.
Even podcasts don't do that well as a business. The longest lasting podcasts are the ones that are essentially one large advertising vehicle for products or services owned by the individual or company running the podcast.
open source, another example of this, has pushed many individuals out of business because they give away many of the same set of features for free and then charge for support. A support company doesn't scale well with a single person or even a couple. This is why pretty much all popular open source projects are funded by large corporations. I can't think of one that isn't.
The pattern has been pretty clear in the last decade: push to give something away for free, the big corps take over because the individual can't compete with free, complain that big corps are ruining everything, and the latest: we now need a basic income because there are no jobs left.
Money is a necessary evil. It can give even the individual more power over their own life. I'm just surprised that so many people here advocate the voluntary shift in power away from the individual and into the hands of big corporations.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised. The whole progressive movement does exactly this. In the Nordic countries for instance, it's nearly impossible to run your own company due to the crippling taxes and regulations involved. Your only choices for employment are big corporations and the government.
My ad-run business is doing pretty well and I'm the only person running it. Ad blocking doesn't seem to have affected me - yet - because my ads are relevant, nice to look at, and self-hosted. Readers and advertisers (and me) get value out of them.
I hope I'm around in the future, and I hope that other websites will see the light and follow good practices.
This is a really great perspective. My background is in the print publishing world...going back to the late 90s. What I realize is that we keep going back to that world for guidance on what the future of the web will hold (in terms of content publishing). The first place I saw this was in design. In the wild west of the early net (prior to about 10 years ago), there was really not much rhyme or reason to how websites were designed. Then people like Khoi Vinh started advocating for grid structure in web design...bringing a concept that was well developed in the print world.
Today, we seem to be fighting for this false binary of either a web with ads or one without. What the old world of print might teach us is the importance of quality, limited, relevant advertising. When done well, people are not only OK with advertising, they embrace and look forward to it. Magazines were best at this...but they've gone down the path of devaluing their ads by moving towards more and more paid content (advertorials) and by overwhelming the content with the quantity of ads.
I think in the end, publishers will have no choice but to see what you see or else perish.
I have the copy of Newsweek that run only Macintosh ads back in 1984. I bought it on eBay just for the ads, certainly not for the feature about Ronald Reagan!
Can you tell us a bit more please? Did you essentially roll your own internal AdWords? How do you manage customers, campaigns, tracking, payments, etc.?
Sure, it really isn't anything special. I essentially treat the site like a magazine and sell advertisements on a monthly basis because that is the easiest thing for both myself and advertisers understand.
The site runs on WordPress so I just use one of the ad rotation plugins available [adrotate pro]. Most campaigns are for some set number of weeks or months and the plugin takes care of that.
I track clicks and advertisers track referrals traffic plus whatever other metrics they want to on their own websites. Because a number of advertisers renew regularly, I trust that they are happy with the results they are seeing. For payments, it kind of depends on the customer, but basically I just invoice them.
Even podcasts don't do that well as a business. The longest lasting podcasts are the ones that are essentially one large advertising vehicle for products or services owned by the individual or company running the podcast.
open source, another example of this, has pushed many individuals out of business because they give away many of the same set of features for free and then charge for support. A support company doesn't scale well with a single person or even a couple. This is why pretty much all popular open source projects are funded by large corporations. I can't think of one that isn't.
The pattern has been pretty clear in the last decade: push to give something away for free, the big corps take over because the individual can't compete with free, complain that big corps are ruining everything, and the latest: we now need a basic income because there are no jobs left.
Money is a necessary evil. It can give even the individual more power over their own life. I'm just surprised that so many people here advocate the voluntary shift in power away from the individual and into the hands of big corporations.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised. The whole progressive movement does exactly this. In the Nordic countries for instance, it's nearly impossible to run your own company due to the crippling taxes and regulations involved. Your only choices for employment are big corporations and the government.