There’s a lot of free, ad-supported content on the internet. You can search the web, read the news, and watch cat videos for free. And even though Hulu is moving to a subscription-only service, you can still (legally) watch plenty of TV shows and movies without paying a penny.
But according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, more than a quarter of folks surfing the web in the US are using ad-blocking software, and while plenty of people are willing to pay for some content (like Netflix or maybe the Wall Street Journal), there are a lot of people who aren’t paying for news… which has led some newsrooms to scale back operations, some popular blogs to close up shop, and other internet sites to take different approaches toward the challenge of trying to pay for the services they offer.
Still, I have to imagine Facebook’s new approach is going to annoy a lot of people.
The social network has announced it will “begin showing ads on Facebook desktop for people who currently use ad blocking software.”
There’s no information about how Facebook will achieve this — and I suspect there’ll be an ongoing battle between Facebook’s developers and those who create popular ad blocking tools like uBlock and AdBlock Plus. But the idea is to recognize when users are running software intended to hide ads… and then to show ads anyway.
As The Wall Street Journal notes, unlike most web sites, Facebook loads ads onto the page itself, which could make it easier for the company to circumvent ad blockers than it would be for most rival services.
Facebook says it’s done a lot of work to figure out how to make ads better and to give users more control over the ads they see: don’t want to see ads about travel? You’ll be able to disable them. Don’t want to see ads from companies that have bought your data? Turn them off.
But based on my experience with readers of this site (and as a citizen of the internet), I know that there are plenty of people who don’t just want more relevant ads. They don’t want any ads… or if they’re willing to accept ads, they want them to be discrete and unobtrusive — you know, so they’re easy to ignore (there’s not a lot of money in ads that you don’t pay attention to though, so good luck with that).
Personally, I’ve come to peace with the fact that a large number of the tech-savvy readers of this website are going to use ad blockers. So I’ve set up an alternate way that people can help support the site. But I have no illusions that a Patreon campaign for Liliputing would ever generate enough revenue to fully support this site, so the ads aren’t going away anytime soon.
I’ll be curious to see what kind of response Facebook’s move gets, though. I mean, what are people going to do… use Google+ instead?
Leave a Reply
Okay, that last one was a bit harsh for a joke. Let’s not kick the dead horse 🙂
https://lh6.googleusercontent….
I guess I could have said MySpace or Orkut…
But that’s the thing isn’t it – my space once seemed huge. Whilst no one ever got as big as Facebook, it’s not invincible if people are fed up with it.
Ads were something that Facebook got right – unobtrusive, and you could close of you didn’t like. Livejournal used to be extremely popular in my circles, then after years of saying they’d never had ads, they started shoving the most annoying ads. Now Livejournal’s a ghost town in comparison.
I typically avoid sites altogether that have overly intrusive ads, especially if I’m on my phone as ads tend to burn through my data faster. This is one of the better sites when it comes to ads.
I find “relevant ads” even more annoying. They’re typically ads for things I’ve already bought or was looking at but decided not to buy.
I have to laugh at FB’s explanation of why you’re seeing an ad (because you gave them your contact information, etc.) It would be nice if only “liking” or following a commercial site would get you everything they post, but it doesn’t.
Ad blocking is a self defense measure against sites that have made what I call the “Internet media mistake.” You aren’t reinventing media. Most media is built on a simple model, the eyeballs are the product. Internalize that truth and everything else follows. Selling those eyeballs is the business you are in, content is just the bait you use to attract em. So many people decided the Internet ‘changed everything’ and that now you don’t have to worry about the hard part, the part that generates the revenue, that all that messy business stuff can be outsourced. Worse, outsourced to dubious people who openly take ads from the most vile, from security threats and worse. Then when the ads attack the users the content creators claim innocence and point out that they just outsource the ads, like that absolves them. Advertising is what pays the bills, it is job one.… Read more »
The press release is rather confusing. Part of it sounds like they’re trying to say if they offer more controls, people will stop block ads on Facebook. But what they actually say is, they’ll start showing ads to those who use at blockers – which makes no sense, the websites obviously don’t get to control that. They might try to get round it, but that’s nothing new, it’s already an arms race between those wanting to show ads, and those ad blockers.
The ‘internet’ democratized the means of producing ‘content’ in general. Initially there was no momentum behind the ‘ad-supported’ portions of content on the internet, and ‘blogging’ and such was primarily the domain of hobbyists at their own expense. As internet content delivery gained momentum and more money was ‘invested’ into content on the internet -and large financially well off entities got in the mix – business models evolved. After much experimentation by different entities with different formats, it was the ad-supported model which ended up being most successful for those trying to create businesses via the internet.This model has enabled many who could otherwise not create a business model out of content delivery to do so. Unfortunately, this too shall pass. Eventually, ad-supported models will be supplanted by something else. And that may mean that – like paper newspapers and the large expansive media organizations of yesterday – a lot… Read more »
Hi Brad,
can you explain why you use a middle man like Patreon? While I can appreciate matchmakers and understand they are useful, often after a couple of years they tend to take a large slice of the money.
Isn’t it possible to do some “begging” straight on this site? Or is the convenience high enough to use something like Patreon?
Yep. I don’t really want to get in the habit of taking direct contributions from dozens of individualss through PayPal, BitCoin, etc. It’s easier to leave payment processing to a third party which will also make it easier for me to fill out paperwork come tax time (I count Patreon as a source of income rather than Wondercool and all the other contributors).
If Patreon’s fees get too high, I can look for alternatives. But this whole crowd-support experiment is still pretty new for me, so nothing is set in stone yet.
I think you make enough money through Paypal they just send you a 1099-K. If you don’t, I think you could just count the donations as coming from “PayPal” the same way you would as coming from “Patreon.”
(Disclosure: I’m not a tax advisor or even a smart tax guy.)