Jimquisition: The Adblock Episode

[vxicepickxv]

"If everyone blocked ads from running, there'd be no show."

But... But... I'm a pub club member!

That works too, if you get enough. I enjoy the HD format shows, with no ads. Everything else is just a bonus.

 

[Yopaz]

Ah, well. Compromise is an important part of life. Also, I agree with the sentiments above - can this comments section be an exception to the rule: Ad Blockers - Do not link to, advocate, or admit to using ad blockers [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/codeofconduct]?

There's another discussion in itself. Why The Escapist feels it necessary to put forum rules in place to deny the existence of ad blockers. That's a whole other level of crazy, like pretending that reality doesn't exist. If they need to resort to such censorship of an increasingly commonplace topic then that's a symptom of a much deeper problem.

Did The Escapist think that by banning mention of ad blockers on the forums, that somehow people wouldn't know that they exist or not use them?

It certainly does prevent people from starting threads "Hey, I need a good adblocker, give me some recommendations" and people actually linking people to adblockers in response to complaints about ad related issues. Preventing the discussion itself is silly though, but they need to specify it in order to actually be able to give out warnings for them.

OT: I have an adblocker that's specific for the Escapist, it's called Publisher's Club and I intend to keep using it. More for the fact that I don't have to watch the shows in flash than for the ads though. God how I hate flash.

 

[Rad Party God]

I think I'm (un?)fortunate enough to not live in the US, because while there is only 1 or 2 slightly annoying ads, it never gets intrusive enough for me, I swear I DO use AdBlock, but I've whitelisted The Escapist (and Massively and Destructoid and TGWTG) for a few years now (in Destructoid's and TGWTG's case, 9 months, since that's the time I started to browse there), every so often I see comments saying the ads are incredibly obtrusive and annoying, and I just can't see what the heck they're talking about, because it isn't obtrusive or annoying enough to dampen my experience browsing through this site.

Again, I use AdBlock, I admit it upfront, but honest to God, I do whitelist The Escapist*, even if there aren't enough ads for me to even justify enabling AdBlock.

[small]*Nope, you don't have any guarantee I do tell the truth, you only have my word, wich is next to useless, but I promise, I'm telling the truth.[/small]

 

[DIEDIEDIE765]

I don't use adblock, actually. I block ad servers through my host file. I don't know which ad servers you guys get your ads from, so it's difficult to actually fix that. I'd remove those ones from the list if I knew.

 

[Kursura]

Didn't even realise they had such repercussions.
Nice to know my lack of an ad blocker is helping these videos.
I'm happy to support

 

[Aardvaarkman]

I guess Jim is better than me, because I will point fingers. Stealing is stealing.

Yes, but blocking ads isn't stealing. Are you stealing a TV show when you go to make a cup of coffee during the ad break, rather than watching the ad?

You have people like me who don't turn on adblock because I get how the money flows. The people who are using adblock, you are the guys that are making the ads more intrusive for ME.

That doesn't seem logical. The people blocking the ads are not the ones who create the ads, or run the ads. Why do you not blame the sites that choose to run these ads? They are the people responsible for running the ads, not those who block them

They're getting worse and more interruptive as time goes on because I'm one of the few "paying my dues". And I do remember back when they weren't nearly so bad, especially on higher end sites that weren't what you call "shady" to begin with.

You're going to need to show some evidence for your claim that ads are getting more intrusive because of ad blocking. Do you really believe that ads would suddenly get less intrusive if everybody stopped ad blocking?

There's also many other reasons why ads have gotten more intrusive over time:

1. Technology - people have fast connections today, so streaming video and animation, etc. is a lot more viable than in the past.
2. Audience - the internet has grown very rapidly, so there are many more people online to sell ads to.
3. Competition - the online advertising market has also grown rapidly, so advertisers have to compete with other ads.

The idea that Adblock users have an significant impact on this seems absurd. The vast majority of people browse without Adblock. And because of the growth of internet users, the number of people viewing websites without Adblock has grown over time, not shrunk. So how does it make any logical sense to blame more intrusive ads on Adblock?

I feel that your sense of outrage and blame may be wildly misplaced.

 

[Kross]

I love the content creators on the Escapist and do what I can to support them, but ye gods the site needs to do a better job of screening its advertising partners.

I also really wish we could change the rules about discussing adblockers. We're not going to have many constructive discussions about this very current, relevant issue if we have to rely on Jim asking for an armistice to avoid getting warned.

People seem to have an issue with discussing something versus advocating something.

The rule WAS don't encourage or enable other people to block our ads.
It said nothing about discussing ad-blocking as a concept. Just don't say THIS IS AWESOME AND I DO IT AND SO SHOULD YOU and all should be fine.

Of course, many people/children like to do the "so have you heard of Adblock *nudge* *wink*" which they like to insist is discussion rather then encouragement.

So in order to save our very overworked moderators from having to deal with constant sophistry on what does or does not constitute discussion, we've added the line that says don't talk about it at all. Very little of use was lost (people on a non-advertising forum that isn't read by anyone who makes such decisions can no longer talk about a topic that only causes more work for moderators), but threads like this can open the discussion in a more controlled manner.


In response to the multiple people asking if Pubclub is a good alternative, of course it is. That's the primary reason Pubclub exists. For perspective however, while it might generate enough money to pay for a lot of the back-end (recurring hosting/network/power costs), we need significantly more to pay the people handling tech/in-house editorial/art/marketing/project management/contributors.

In response to the people only blocking part of the site. While your favorite content producer often gets paid based on views to their content, the MONEY that pays them comes from everything, not just their content's personal ads.
VIEWING content is what determines how long it lives - content that gets more views will stay on the site longer then content that doesn't. This is due to the ad model as well of course, as high page views support the ads that pay for everything - if we were able to go full subscription then we could support more niche projects.

Speaking of niche!
READING
PEOPLE HATE READING [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJtEbvSOd_E].

When the site started, we were exclusively multi-page articles. We paid for stock photos for our artists to use as a base to make custom layouts for every article [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/content/download.php?id=7747], and did it every week for months.
We had great writing in a style rarely seen elsewhere, beautiful layouts, and my stats showed major game studios as our primary traffic (top client IPs were Bioware/Ubisoft/Microsoft/EA/etc).
However, if every active game developer read us... that's still maybe 10k uniques at best. Lots of fantastic and influential people, but none of them are helping pay for the hosting and our 25cent-a-word articles. If we went subscription only, we'd have even fewer readers (both due to effort and most people not actually justifying paying for game articles) that would taper off even more with time.

In regards to the "people hate reading" comment, we had stats for our early articles that would show views per page.
WITHOUT FAIL, we saw the same pattern [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers] in viewers, regardless of the quality/relevance of the content they were reading.
If 10000 people read the first page, 8000 would read the second, 6000 would read the third, 4000 would read the fourth page, etc. You might expect people to generally finish an article they were over halfway through, or otherwise show behavior based on the tedium of the content, but no.
The only constant factor was effort to click through to the next page. Every single article had an inverse slope of readers per page over time. How can we have a business model based on reading when nobody can even finish an article because "ugh so many words"

We saw this again with many contests (on WarCry back when it was an active site) that gave away free things where we'd have more prizes left over then contest entries (these days we're big enough due to non readers and more aggressive promotion where that rarely happens). Effort.

So, then we got videos to bring in the page views so we could keep making a website. Which brought in orders of magnitude more people because it's so much easier to sit there and absorb something amusing. We still try and run articles every chance we get, but it's more whenever the higher page view things bleed enough cash where we can pay a writer to make something that won't pay for itself.
This fact depresses me daily. I love our video content, but the fact that we can't support writing because nobody will pay for it...

Due to the above, I personally find it insulting when other sites (occasionally with people who have worked with us and know these facts) decide they can do high-effort pretty long form content for free or ad-supported "the right way." When the many brilliant people I've worked with here sacrificed so much to try and make that model work.
I do admit to personally being smugly satisfied when such projects run out of money and fail (though feel bad for those without prior experience who tried to make it work), primarily because if they succeed it means that all the brilliant people I've worked with just "did it wrong" after years of effort. But it is nice to have some finely produced content to enjoy while some other internet patron's money is still flowing.

Speaking of Patrons, we ran on Venture Capitol for many years. There was at least one point where they forgave our debt and gave us more money to keep doing our thing. There were several points where we had to lay off some great coworkers/friends because of funding being cut and no money coming in. There were several points where our fantastic leader (the guy speaking in the above TED talk video) managed to bring these people back under other job titles to keep them employed. Eventually we managed to get bought by a real media company with successful sites before our investors finally cut the cord (we never made them money of course). While we are still dealing with integrating with a larger entity, it's fantastic to have more connections into both places people can see our content and people who will pay for ads on it.

Oh yeah, I didn't mention how hard it is to actually GET ads on a site. Most ad companies interested in our content will only buy for US audiences (larger paying gamer audience/just don't care about "foreign" markets due to various good and bad reasons). Out of the ones that do, they typically will only spend their limited advertising budgets in very specific places. Requirements like "top 3 trafficked video game related website".

You know what ads the #4 most popular website gets? [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H68eCEWKb7M&t=158]
So we had many months where even with "decent" traffic, we couldn't even fill the ad space. Which means no money other then what "filler" ads bring in, or "house" ads that just point to our own site.


AS FAR AS OBNOXIOUS ADS are concerned, they come from two directions.
One is from an advertiser saying "hey we know this is obnoxious, but we'll pay you SEVERAL TIMES MORE per view for this because it is so obnoxious.
The other is from "filler ads" that bring in a whole network. When we can't run targeted ads (due to nobody wanting to buy that space or not being selected for the ad lottery that month and getting no real ads) we run filler ads, which are a network that we tell "give us X categories of ads". These networks allow us to retro-actively block certain ads, but we mostly rely on them to block "bad" ads from getting through.

(As a quick aside - first time we tried to use Google Adwords as filler years ago, they kept pushing MMO gold seller ads that we expressly forbade. Our only option was a LITERAL (no wildcards) HAND MAINTAINED BLACKLIST OF SPAMMER DOMAINS that had something like a 200 domain LIMIT. EVERY GOLD SELLER URL was a unique throwaway domain, and later they started using web searches for their URL. We couldn't even ban all the domains we knew about due to hitting the size limit on Google's blacklist.)

These days as we're slightly bigger and can give the companies running these filler ads a harder time, they've been pretty good overall about keeping crap out. However, each region has their own ads and stuff slips through.

I'd really love to self host ads and get rid of the annoying Javascript includes (WHICH ARE SO EASY TO BLOCK, my personal favorite is blocking the "blockmetrics" include) - but A SELF HOSTED AD ISN'T TRACKED BY THIRD PARTIES. Which means ad companies will very rarely pay for it because they can't "trust" the numbers. Which means that they use braindead Javascript that's easily filtered. Also notice that sites you see who host/design their own ads typically have higher quality ads and relatively little user complaints - often the users enjoy the community targeted humor/etc that these kinds of banners tend to employ.

PLEASE LET US KNOW [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/groups/chat/Tech-Team] if an ad is playing noise (without you starting it) or won't close/is otherwise obnoxious. Unfortunately the other annoying types of ads (rollovers that do close, flashing idiocy) probably can't be removed because they pay for the privilege. But if it's bad please complain and we will pass it along to our ad people. Most people don't say anything (again, effort or indignation at having seen the ad in the first place generally leads to blocking everything)
Often due to region targeting or not watching a particular piece of content with multiple people to see everything, we don't see the ads at all / in the proper context / only non-technical people see them and don't realize something is wrong.

Pretty much all of us here despise the entire website advertising ecosystem outside of self hosted custom designed things (i.e. effort was taken to make it look good for the target audience - which also costs more money/time). BUT! They are the only way to PAY for a website to run.
Alternate revenue streams are upfront donations by the majority of a site's traffic in a way that doesn't significantly reduce the traffic we'd get from not charging. This is almost impossible to sustain, and even if you do start with a solid audience, the audience will taper off over time for more important expenses unless you regularly give them something completely unique (that likely costs even more money then your average "quality" content due to being a unique expense)

One last note on ad trackers that you see so many of everywhere. These are the trackers ad companies used of "impartial traffic monitoring" - when we tell them we have X traffic, these trackers back up our numbers (or for things like Google Analytics, are often a "modern" website's only form of personal traffic analysis - which also saddens me greatly for various reasons). Or in the case of shit like Comscore, companies pay an unreasonable sum (several thousand) to be added to Comscore's database which is an aggregator for many large advertising companies to pick the top 3 sites in their niche and only advertise with them (I think/hope we're done with them). Anyway, the other trackers are generally how ad companies actually track impressions, so blocking them is sometimes worse then blocking the ads for a website.
I personally block third party Google as often as possible, because while I like their utility, they're too omnipresent now; and I enjoy putting holes in the log files of people who would rather use third party Javascript to give them to Google then keep real logs.


SHORTER VERSION:
Talking about Adblock is banned because too many people like playing with the moderators and the definition of "advocating" something.
We hate browsing with ads, but don't know of other reasonable ways to pay for the people and hosting of the site.

Pubclub helps, but can't pay for enough to run the site by itself unless MANY more people use it. We're always trying to think of ways to make it more attractive, but it's hard to come up with things that we wouldn't enable for everyone.

People as a whole really really hate effort, which is why the only way you can make money on the Internet is from people paying you to show lazy people shiny things repeatedly until they lazily/accidentally click through and give the product flashing in front of them their low effort business.

On a related note, here is a funny picture:

(a bit garbled, but hope it's informative for someone and doesn't get us blacklisted from the internet advertising cabal)

 

[Gaboris]

DARN! I forgot about my own ABP. O_O

Personally I have no problem with normal ads since for me they're basically part of a web page. Yes annoying or in your face ads do drive me crazy as well and I'm happy to see them go, but those weren't my reason for blocking.
A year or so ago I got a bug on my comp that pops up ads in the lower left corner of all my browsers(Even in the freaking STEAM client!) and they were obstructing important stuff at times so I needed those blocked.(Sadly it doesn't block it all of the times.) :-/

For good sites and creators that I watch -or as you said it if we blockers are ASKED to support then- I'm glad to white list pages. Although I have no idea how much it's worth since I never click them and most of the times I don't even notice ads.

But anyways The Escapist is white listed from now on. Sorry for not doing so before, but I actually didn't notice that ABP was on.
Seriously the Escapist admins should think about adding those "If an ad is blocek then show a text asking them for support." things to the ads since they do work for some of us.

 

[Tastum]

You asked nicely so I bought a Pub Club membership 10 minutes ago.. I cannot abide ads but less than 2 bucks a month for a site I read daily is not much to ask for.

HOWEVER, I really don't like all the warnings I've seen so far in this thread (I'm on page 5) - whether it's against the forum rules or not, it really doesn't sit well with me. Just my opinion.

 

[Redd the Sock]

There's a general perception that all internet advertising is scamming ("You're the one-millionth visitor to this website! Click here to claim your prize!") that's generally aimed at people too young or inexperienced with the 'net to know any better. Some of them aimed at children (the Spongebob-themed one "shoot the jellyfish to claim a prize" comes to mind) strike me as particularly repulsive. I'm not sure that ALL advertising is like this, but nowadays I wouldn't dare to click even on the ads that name legitimate companies. Yeah, it might SAY it's from a reputable banking website, but so did those e-mails I used to get, before content filtering became a "thing", that wanted my online banking username and password for a "security update".

This in many ways is the crux of the problem. Advertisers never learn. That thing we order from the back of a comic turned out to be a dud: we stop ordering from comics. That commercial does things the toy seems to fail at: we stop falling for commercials. Miracle products from infomercials that don't actually work: stop buying from late night TV. Telemarketers: same thing Then came the internet and first it was fly by night scams out for our credit cards, and now it's full malware. Even live sales people have me seeing scams. As soon as I hear someone say they're from an energy companay about anything, I assume all they want is to sign me to a 5 year contract at shitty rates no matter what else they're trying to say about rebate programs.

The concept of advertising is great. Don't we all want to know about goods and services we might have overlooked? Isn't that what Trailers are? However a lack of truth in advertising sours all of us on the concept, and instead of trying to make marketing something we can trust and look forward to, marketers fall back of dirtier and dirtier tricks and villify us. How dare you not risk malware on your computer so we can keep in business, instead of complaining to the malware ad that they are the ones hurting your business by making people afraid to even look at your ads.

 

[Vareoth]

[HEADING=2]Use Our Forums Appropriately[/HEADING]
Ad Blockers - Do not link to, advocate, or admit to using ad blockers

Gotta say, as a mod, it's pretty exasperating how obvious it is that people have not, or will not, read the forum rules.
Such people often then complaining that they're being warned unfairly, for breaking a rule they never knew existed, etc.

All of this can be alleviated by giving the forum rules a proper and thorough read.

How about you just close this entire topic then. If you're just going to punish an entire point of view on the subject you might as well stop pretending you want any proper discourse.

And just FYI, I'm not trying to be hostile. I'm just trying to be direct.

 

[metalslug10]

nobody hates you Jim ... they just say that because they have nothing better to do

 

[Alcamonic]

Now I feel bad about using Adblocker. I will remove it from this site and your other channels immediately.

Will you accept a package of adult diapers as compensation?

 

[IceForce]

How about you just close this entire topic then. If you're just going to punish an entire point of view on the subject you might as well stop pretending you want any proper discourse.

I've complained about this before.

Had this thread been made by an ordinary user, it would've been locked on page 1 or 2.
But for some reason, if it's a content thread, it never gets locked (even in cases where a lock is quite obviously needed).

 

[Louis Madican]

I've just watched your ad block show. Now I am a self confessed wind-up clock in a digital world. I don't know if I have ad block on, I wouldn't of thought I do. As these things tend to be an option, someone who was born in #91 should know how to do. It also had a big box around the screen trying to sell phones.

but I support the idea of internet advertising in essence. It founds creative people to provide service for different demographics, more old school forms of media wouldn't reach. It should just be more up front.

"HEY YOU! Do you not have enough shit? Are you tired of having to go all the way to your friends house to see their face? Buy this phone so you don't even have to leave the comfort of your own wifi hub."

Thus stepping ever closer to the Orwellian abyss. Now I know this is the technology of my childhood science fiction, now in my life time: 3d printers, wireless internet, facetime on phones with more computing power than the Apollo luna missions. and internet advertising is a big part of that revolution. Telling people what the next thing for them to spend money they don't have, on things they don't need.

Also I'm not one of these religious nuts, Darwin bless them, who see science as the devils work. that would be a tad hypocritical, as even now I'm messaging you from the other side of our planet intently.

I must just be old fashioned. Cause I like my printers to print, and my scanners too scan. but maybe that's just me.

Louis lost to the digital generation since 1991

 

[VikingKing]

Member of the publisher's club, consider it very worthwhile in terms of benefits per buck.

I feel like there's a whole lot less bad press for individual online advertisements which aren't only boring, annoying, or distracting...but can actually be stuffed with all kinds of nasty surprises on them. Because it's expected to a degree.

Or maybe it's because the people who do advertisements of the scum-sucking variety could pack up and move to a different country within the time it'd take for someone up the ladder to pay attention.

 

[RedDeadFred]

I just don't understand why anyone would endorse the auto-play video ads that have sound. They don't make me in anyway want to buy the product. They just piss me off because I have to go play the game of "let's find where this fucking video is somewhere in this cluster fuck of ads and stop it so that I don't have some lady yelling in my fucking ears about laundry detergent." These ads made me want to AVOID the company's product rather than buy them.

Then there's the ones that take advantage of the gullible and can result in those people ruining their computers. If a site runs those kind of ads, fuck them. They honestly don't deserve the money because they are supporting a scam that harms people. I've never fallen for any of that kind of shit but I know people who have and it really sucks for them.

 

[Bassmaster92]

I hadn't really thought about it from the point of view from the provider, i have white listed the escapist website, i have already experienced having to pause a video because i could not mute an ad in the sidebar i just had to wait for it to play out, i am not opposed to supporting this content but i would like to to run a little smoother

 

[Saulkar]

Whitelisting is not hard, just google how to do it.

Spoiler: As proof the Escapist is whitelisted:

I often also whitelist web comic sites because they often only advertise other web comics to keep my interests fed as well as other content creator sites such as youtube, penny arcade, destructoid, and roosterteeth. I want to keep certain websites funded so that they can keep rolling out content but I have also accidentally clicked one too many links were they attempted to use adverts to inject viruses into my computer.

Formatting a hard drive is not a pleasant experience if you did not backup recently.

Jesus, after all the warnings I'll be right pissed if I get one for contributing to the conversation.

 

[Undomesticated Equine]

Honestly the advertising is extremely annoying on mobile version of escapist when some app called mobogenie actually tries to force you to download it in .apk form when you enter the site the first thing you have to do when coming here on mobile is cancel the install and to me that is just infuriating and i will not put up with that so i stopped visiting escapist from my smart phone the same way i stopped watching tv because of ads and switched my free time to videogames. It is sometimes quite strange as people feel somehow superior to you cause you are playing videogames while they watch TV in their free time exposing themselves to all those retarded adds and shitty sitcoms.