Another Look at Online Advertising
Linked by David Adams on Fri 19th Mar 2010 21:07 UTC
OSNews, Generic OSes Online advertising has been a hot topic for the past week or so, with Ars Technica trying out an interesting, somewhat desperate experiment wherein they blocked access to their content for people using Adblock. Of course, if this were to become some kind of movement among publishers, it would probably just spark a technological cat-and-mouse game that would surely be reminiscent of DRM cracking or iPhone jailbreaking. But in their post-mortem, Ars states that it was a worthwhile awareness campaign, and I hope that's true. But I thought it would be a good idea to try to bring the collective OSNews brainpower together and crowdsource the idea of how to raise money for a web site in an age where advertising is increasingly un-viable.
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RE[2]: So, here's the problem
by google_ninja on Sat 20th Mar 2010 16:05 UTC in reply to "RE: So, here's the problem"
google_ninja
Member since:
2006-02-05

Using flashblock eliminates 99% of those. If people only block some ads, that will push publishers not to use them. That isn't what we are talking about, we are talking about people blocking everything.

I work for a company where we spend 40-50k/mo on bandwidth costs serving content. In our case, it is very clear who is paying that cost and why they are paying it. Some of our clients ask us to put up ads to mitigate some costs, and I can totally understand that. But regardless, running a big site costs a lot of money. If you are a site like ars, offering high quality content for free, where should that money come from?

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