“Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love”
Interesting article over at Ars Technica about web users who run ad blockers.
“There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won’t hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis.”
What’s this have to do with Cubeecraft? Hit the jump to read on.
I post it here because I get emails every week from people who see nothing on the homepage because they are running ad blockers – since the images on the homepage are 300×250 (a standard ad size) most blockers seem to just not load them. This was an unintentional side effect of a design decision when creating the homepage that has caused a bit of grief, but has opened my eyes to the large a mount of people running blockers and how in the long run they may be hurting sites like this one. Each Cubeecraft is about 1/2 a MB, and there are thousands of visitors a day so you can imagine bandwidth gets pretty out of hand very quickly. I manage though and have been able to avoid hosting files on file sharing sites like a lot of the other paper toy creators*. You may have noticed recently that there are a few more ads on the site – I have tried to keep them as unobtrusive as possible because I want the experience on the site to be as good as possible since that is the way I like it when I am browsing the web.
People write me concerned that this will become a pay site at some point. I don’t know where they got the idea but I’ve heard it more than once now so I will just come out and say it – Cubeecraft will never be a pay site. There is a skeleton of a store, and the store will be growing within the next year but even then it will only offer specialty items that most people could not simply download and print.
Anyway I hope you are enjoying the site! Be sure to check out what’s going on on the Cubeecraft Network (there’s a bunch of people doing a lot of nice work), visit the official Cubeecraft Deviantart page for a bunch of Cubeecraft you can only get there and check out Cubeecraft on Facebook and Twitter and be on the lookout for a bunch of new stuff coming soon.
Thanks for your support!
*not that there is anything wrong with that.
While I understand the issue, the problem isn’t sites that keep the ads unobtrusive. It’s the exceptions, such as sites that run flash ads, ads with music, popups, etc etc
Blocking these does end up inadvertently hurting the sites that do it right, but unleashing control of what you have to view when you’re surfing, even if it’s only to a small amount of advertisers who are obviously collossal douchebags, isn’t a step I want to take. Or would really recommend. A good question is, why is there a demand for an adblocker at all? if it wasn’t necessary, which it shouldn’t be, it wouldn’t exist.
Unblocking sites you want to support is a good idea of course!
I have a website that relys on ad clicks/ views to survive as well, for the hosting and domain, and I have the link to Adblock advertised on it, with notes on how to unblock sites they want to support.
If you’re getting a lot of mail about the site not functioning, maybe a little note at the bottom, or link, about AdBlock (with appropriate descriptions eg how to unblock sites), might be a good idea..
AdBlock has this response to the article on their site:
http://adblockplus.org/blog/the-devastating-effects-of-ad-blocking
I’m currently pretty for using a blocker, since I’m stuck on a (oold) laptop with windows 2000 (I know), without support for adblock. Every now and again the computer lags for five minutes, or crashes completely… And only sites that allow Flash/ Any advertising, or have 5+ animated banners. And there are still people out there with dial-up..
It sucks, they suck, and I can’t wait to browse normally again.