NewClassic said:
In this case, I would have to disagree. That already happens. People who go to concerts often walk into stadiums lined with advertisements. Every concession stand proudly has Coke emblems on their drink fountains and Budweiser taps on the countertops. The drive to the concert hall is teeming with billboards and business names. Somewhere, everywhere, there's an advertisement. Be it someone's branded shirt to a flyer drifting on the floor on the way in. However some may feel, advertisements are everywhere in this society.
That said, "blaming the user" isn't the route this is taking. It's saying to consider whitelisting or not using adblocker so the ads don't get more abrasive. And if you do cut off this man's paycheck, perhaps he shouldn't listen to you as you're not his paying audience. Seems like a pretty reasonable response to me.
Also, there is a subscription system in place, called the Publisher's Club. Find it's benefits here [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/subscription/details].
And if the bands or the venues relied solely on ad metrics to fund their businesses, they wouldn't last very long.
Imagine if you went to read a book, and the pages were 3 times as wide as necessary to read the book so that the publisher(not the author) could sell add space to anyone willing to pay for it... As many people have said, when ads aren't intrusive, they aren't blocked, and they tend to get ignored as irrelevant, because ultimately, to most people looking for information about a particular subject, they are...
And it is blaming the user. I don't owe him a paycheck, none of us do. The Escapist does. It is THEIR job to pay the contributors, not mine. Do you pay your mechanic based on the work they do for everyone else, or for the work you contract them to do for YOU? I didn't ask Jim to make videos, he chooses to do that. The assumption of value comes from Jim and the escapist, not from the user. As I said, true metrics and value are determined when the only access is granted via a subscription. But the fact of the matter is that both Jim and The Escapist realize that their content is only as valuable as the people who consume it, no consumption, no external value(Obviously creative works have value beyond marketability).
There are benefits to offering content for free, to exposing it to the world. Benefits that Jim and the Escapist reap via ads and the user base spreading and sharing content. There are additional revenue streams available via ads, where people are willing to pay for access to your users, being it directly or indirectly. Those are THEIR choices as to how they present the content. Implying that anyone who comes here is some how beholden to The Escapist and it's content providers simply because they produce content is ridiculous.
If we CHOOSE to allow ads, or to subscribe, that is OUR decision, not theirs. They waved that right when they put this site up and exposed it for free. They chose more exposure over user funded content, so that is what they got.
Ads may pay the bills, but that is not OUR responsibility. How you make money from your content is on you. Don't want people looking at it for free? Put it behind a pay wall. Don't want to limit your audience? Put it up for free and accept the ad revenue you get as a measure of value and leave it at that.
Trying to force people to pay(and yes being inundated with ads is a form of payment) for "free" content, kind of defeats the point of making it "free".
The irony, you get paid regardless, and anyone who actually uses your site has to interact with an ad to post...
