It'd be good if we stopped pretending everyone runs adblock. 99.5%+ of people have no issue with ads, and actually find them useful.
That 0.5% who run adblock etc, really aren't worth worrying about much.
Then again, it also probably has a larger percentage of people that wouldn't pay any attention to the ads even if they were visible. From Ars' point of view it would be great if these people shut of their ad blockers, but the advertisers would probably be getting the short end of the stick, in that case, which would (over the long term) drive advertising prices down, etc. Ars would pick up some profits in the meantime, but solely at the expense of the advertisers, who are now getting screwed by paying for eyeballs that are worth less on average than the ones when people weren't shutting their ad blockers down. I'd certainly pay less for per-impression ads on a site that wouldn't show content to people with an ad blocker, for this very reason.
It's a grand circle of life, and frankly, it's hard to say what second order effects any of these actions might have. It very well may be that the presence of ad blockers raises the average value of the eyeballs that do see the ads enough that advertising prices end up higher and Ars does better overall. It's equally possible that they're correct, the ad market hasn't adjusted to the presence of ad blockers yet, and they're still getting paid too little per-eyeball. I'm not sure. Neither are they.
But in theory, at least, over the long term, if people with ad blockers really aren't paying any attention to ads anyways, the market should correct for this and the results for both advertisers and the sites providing ad space should approach the true value.
My gut feeling is that people who block ads globally but see them on Ars would actually notice/respond to them better than people who are just generally banner blind. If the majority of the people who've emailed us are to be believed, they don't see anything else on the page except ads when they have ads enabled. I bet advertisers would kill for that. ;)
The biggest problem is that there's no chance someone blocking ads is going to see an ad, and there's a real (but maybe tiny) chance that same person would respond to an ad. There's an even better chance that they'd respond to a really nice campaign that "spoke" to them.
That 0.5% who run adblock etc, really aren't worth worrying about much."
Adblock plus on mozilla.org gets around 1,000,000 downloads per week. It may not be a huge percentage now, but if it continues at this rate, it will be.
I have a site with (in february) 37663 pageviews reported by google adsense, but 49581 pageviews reported by google analytics. If the mismatch there is from adblockers, then I must be an outlier. I hope it is that google didnt have ads to match and displayed some public information message instead.
I'm not bitter or anything though. I block ads myself, mostly because I'm too afraid of accidentally clicking ads on a site of my own, and the punishment that can lead to.
Please do. I certainly wasn't pretending that in the first place.