A word of caution to the Neatorama crew: Click-baiting headlines like the one on this article, not to mention the amount of front-page space devoted to a post that basically says, "I yanked people's chains, some of them called me on it, and now I think those people suck" do nothing to enhance this site's reputation for aggregating links to neat stuff.
Ask yourself this: if this little drama were playing out on some other website (and I'm sure you can find a dozen examples if you really want to), would you link to it? Is this article Neat(tm) enough to be approved on its own merits, or is it getting special treatment because it's an internal matter?
I come to this site because it has a good track record for aggregating links that I'd be willing to pass on to a friend. I don't come for self-referential opinion posts and "ooh! ooh! click me!" headlines.
I find the whole line of discussion proper to this thread uninteresting in the extreme. My only reason for posting is to remind you that you have a good reputation for aggregating stuff I do find interesting, and to warn you about the dangers of making drek like this regular fare
This is one of those side effects of trademark law that sound absurd but are (unfortunately) necessary.
Trademark operates on an 'enforce it or lose it' standard. If a trademark holder doesn't take continuous and credible measures to protect their mark, they lose it. That's how 'kleenex' stopped being a brand name and became a generic term for 'snot-wiper'.
3M went ballistic to retain its rights to the term 'Velcro', and now you see products labeled 'hook and loop fastener' in the store. Chrysler-Daimler opened a crate of whoopass over the term 'Jeep', which is why we have a category of cars called 'sport utility vehicles'. In 2000, Yahoo! and the Australian actor/director Yahoo Serious had to go to court because the company applied for trademark over that term in the Australian entertainment market. A year or two ago, Google had to haul out the lawyers to keep the term 'Googling' from reducing their company name to a generic term for internet search.
So let's face it: the iPod brand name is phenomenally valuable. It's so valuable that a horde of people want to use the term without actually paying royalties to Apple. If Apple doesn't maintain a track record of being serious about finding and stopping anything that even /might/ be a violation, they risk having 'iPod' become as generic a term as 'kleenex'.
And if you don't think these companies are trying to catch a free ride on Apple's coat tails, ask yourself how they came up with a name that contains 'pod' in the first place. As an acid test, replace 'pod' with the name of some other MP3 player and see if the overall concept still holds:
"Dollars to doughnuts" is the shortened form of "I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts," from an age when doughnuts cost a heckuva lot less than a buck each.
Anyone willing to make that lopsided a bet would be very sure they were right.
I've been a web developer since 1996, and have seen this issue debated more times than I care to count.
The answer is: NO.
Blocking ads doesn't hurt advertisers at all. Advertisers pay on a CPM basis.. so many cents per thousand impressions, regardless of how many pages the site generates in the course of delivering those thousand impressions. If anything, ad-blocking makes sites slightly more attractive on a CPM basis, because it keeps an advertiser's impressions from being wasted on the people who are least likely to generate qualified click-throughs.
Blocking ads doesn't hurt site owners either. The CPM you can charge for ads is based on the efficacy of those ads: the number of qualified click-throughs the client gets per thousand impressions delivered. So let's think about what would happen if site owners were able to force ads to go out on every single page: the people who block ads would most likely ignore them, thus reducing the efficacy of a thousand impressions. That, in turn, would reduce the CPM the site owner could charge for impressions, leaving total revenue about where it is now.
It takes a huge difference in bandwidth to raise the marginal cost of generating a page without ads above 'zero', but every person who views the content counts as a potential word-of-mouth reference to bring additional users to the site, or to submit a story to Digg, or otherwise act in a way that will drive additional traffic. Ad revenue is only one aspect of a user's value to a site, and it's almost impossible to frame an economically valid argument in support of the idea that users cost more than they're worth.
And there's an ethical questions for the site owners themselves: When you quote traffic statistics to potential clients, do you quote thousands of impressions served per month (meaning you've fully insulated the client from any effect ad-blocking might have) or do you quote 'unique page views' which include all those pages that went out without ads, Google spider hits, and other non-ad-encumbered pages you shipped?
Banner ads are the fast-and-easy, bottom-feeding crap layer of online marketing anyway, and I really can't be buggered to care about people who want better returns from such a lousy business model.
Ask yourself this: if this little drama were playing out on some other website (and I'm sure you can find a dozen examples if you really want to), would you link to it? Is this article Neat(tm) enough to be approved on its own merits, or is it getting special treatment because it's an internal matter?
I come to this site because it has a good track record for aggregating links that I'd be willing to pass on to a friend. I don't come for self-referential opinion posts and "ooh! ooh! click me!" headlines.
I find the whole line of discussion proper to this thread uninteresting in the extreme. My only reason for posting is to remind you that you have a good reputation for aggregating stuff I do find interesting, and to warn you about the dangers of making drek like this regular fare
Trademark operates on an 'enforce it or lose it' standard. If a trademark holder doesn't take continuous and credible measures to protect their mark, they lose it. That's how 'kleenex' stopped being a brand name and became a generic term for 'snot-wiper'.
3M went ballistic to retain its rights to the term 'Velcro', and now you see products labeled 'hook and loop fastener' in the store. Chrysler-Daimler opened a crate of whoopass over the term 'Jeep', which is why we have a category of cars called 'sport utility vehicles'. In 2000, Yahoo! and the Australian actor/director Yahoo Serious had to go to court because the company applied for trademark over that term in the Australian entertainment market. A year or two ago, Google had to haul out the lawyers to keep the term 'Googling' from reducing their company name to a generic term for internet search.
So let's face it: the iPod brand name is phenomenally valuable. It's so valuable that a horde of people want to use the term without actually paying royalties to Apple. If Apple doesn't maintain a track record of being serious about finding and stopping anything that even /might/ be a violation, they risk having 'iPod' become as generic a term as 'kleenex'.
And if you don't think these companies are trying to catch a free ride on Apple's coat tails, ask yourself how they came up with a name that contains 'pod' in the first place. As an acid test, replace 'pod' with the name of some other MP3 player and see if the overall concept still holds:
- MyZuner
- TightZune
- ZuneShow
- Zunium
Anyone willing to make that lopsided a bet would be very sure they were right.
The answer is: NO.
Blocking ads doesn't hurt advertisers at all. Advertisers pay on a CPM basis.. so many cents per thousand impressions, regardless of how many pages the site generates in the course of delivering those thousand impressions. If anything, ad-blocking makes sites slightly more attractive on a CPM basis, because it keeps an advertiser's impressions from being wasted on the people who are least likely to generate qualified click-throughs.
Blocking ads doesn't hurt site owners either. The CPM you can charge for ads is based on the efficacy of those ads: the number of qualified click-throughs the client gets per thousand impressions delivered. So let's think about what would happen if site owners were able to force ads to go out on every single page: the people who block ads would most likely ignore them, thus reducing the efficacy of a thousand impressions. That, in turn, would reduce the CPM the site owner could charge for impressions, leaving total revenue about where it is now.
It takes a huge difference in bandwidth to raise the marginal cost of generating a page without ads above 'zero', but every person who views the content counts as a potential word-of-mouth reference to bring additional users to the site, or to submit a story to Digg, or otherwise act in a way that will drive additional traffic. Ad revenue is only one aspect of a user's value to a site, and it's almost impossible to frame an economically valid argument in support of the idea that users cost more than they're worth.
And there's an ethical questions for the site owners themselves: When you quote traffic statistics to potential clients, do you quote thousands of impressions served per month (meaning you've fully insulated the client from any effect ad-blocking might have) or do you quote 'unique page views' which include all those pages that went out without ads, Google spider hits, and other non-ad-encumbered pages you shipped?
Banner ads are the fast-and-easy, bottom-feeding crap layer of online marketing anyway, and I really can't be buggered to care about people who want better returns from such a lousy business model.