
As you may know, the global economic depression has hit the media hard, due in large part to the fact that ad rates are in the toilet. OSNews is in the same boat. Despite the fact that we still have good advertisers, our income from advertising this year will only be a fraction of what it was last year. We probably won't make enough to cover our costs. Other news sites, as they've seen revenue decrease, have responded with more, and more intrusive, advertising. We don' t want to do that. We feel we have a covenant with our readers. If you'll be respectful of our need to run ads, we'll be respectful of your need to read the site without having ads shoved down your throat. Please read on, for more discussion of our ad "covenant," and a plea for help, including a plea to all Adblock users to please unblock OSNews.
Member since:
2007-07-10
It is not like ads are the only option. http://contenture.com/ is a service where users pay a subscription, and sites get a per visit fee. You and people like you are ushering in that vision of the internet.
That's just wrong. This site is free. They made a choice to add advertisements to help pay for hosting, bandwidth etc. They could have closed the site and offered memberships, or they could have added a donate button, or add whatever alternative here. But whatever they choose to do, they've so far kept the content free probably to keep the user base.
It seems that with your logic, visiting this site with a text-only browser is somehow being a leech. If that is so, I think that business model needs to be re-thunk - back to the drawing board and come up with something that doesn't annoy the hell out of your visitors and potentially slowing down the site load times considerably, making the user experience a bad one.