Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Menace to ad revenue

Some time ago there were some reports such as one here, that called for blocking Firefox due to its adblock extension which leads to lost revenues.
While I do not intend to say anything about the adblock extension as such and argue why blocking Firefox is just stupid, I do intend to look at why the decision was irrational and nowhere near the solution to the problem.
It is important to distinguish that problem is not the adblock and that people use it to ignore ads but that ad generated revenues are going down. It would be natural to seek answers if you would see that your user base is growing however you revenue is not. This is exactly what has happened and I believe that adblock got all the blame for no reason - well... undeserved blame at least.
To see the true reason one has to look past browsers and into internet usage trends.
I should say that I read my fair share of blogs and news sites every day and more there are, harder it is to keep up whith which ones you have read already and which you still need to read. sometimes I just forgot about some and later had too many things to go through and I believe this in a way is a problem for many readers out there. One of the best solutions for this is using a feed reader. Most of the sites nowadays support some for of feeds so it is easy to switch to them and many people do so. I would not say that I personally have signed of for incredible amount of them but enough of then to see a connection prior mentioned problem.
I have not seen a single ad on a feed.
When I looked at my trends on in Google reader, I look at about 13% stories and I go the page even less - mostly for feeds that only give headlines as rest of the stories I read on the feed. So here we are - the ultimate threat to ad supported sites is its readers best friend - feed!
Another important aspect to look at is that even you have headline only feed (maybe with first paragraph) you still loose on people not opening main page and spending time on site to browse it rather than just read the story.
I was also weary impressed with Google reader as I have not seen any ads on it so far... impressive knowing that that is how they make money!!

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