Comment by BrandonM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BrandonM | Hacker News Reader

From one of the comments on that page:

Attention Site Owners:

Visitors are not responsible for supporting your business model whether it be ad-based or anything else. Business involves risk. If you decide to employ a poor model, such as requiring your visitors to view or click on your ads, and your visitors choose not to. Guess what. That's called a bad business model.

If your poor argument was applied to other businesses, say, grocery stores for instance, it would be an act of theft to go into a grocery store and not buy something or view the in-store ads. By your reckoning, you should then be banned from entering that store. Stupid? Of course it is, but that's your argument.

Here's a tip. If you want to make money, why not offer something of real value to your visitors like a product or service. Provide content that is so good that people will want to pay for it. That's called doing good business.

Begging people to look at your ads for junk they neither want or need is nothing but ad welfare.

I hadn't heard that argument, and I must say that I find myself agreeing with it. On some level, the whole advertising system is a giant house of cards. I have never heard of anyone buying anything from an ad they clicked on, yet ads are so prevalent. At some point, businesses are going to stop throwing invested money at worthless ads and instead are going to find other means for promoting their products.

Interesting, but this is just stupid:

> Here's a tip. If you want to make money, why not offer something of real value to your visitors like a product or service. Provide content that is so good that people will want to pay for it. That's called doing good business.

If sites supported entirely by advertising had no "real value" then people probably wouldn't be using them so much... The commenter has no clue about internet "business."

> Begging people to look at your ads for junk they neither want or need is nothing but ad welfare.

And this is exactly the FAULT of google. It is incredibly counter-productive that publishers cannot directly support the advertised products as is the case with CPC advertising.

You're right. I mostly was intrigued by his stance regarding business models. Consumers often find ways of using products in an unintended manner, and if your business model does not recognize and account for that, you are likely missing out on a valuable resource. Consumers blocking ads is just another example of an unexpected usage of a product, and if you are not prepared for that, you are trying to ignore the nature of smart web users who just want to get at the information or service without all the distractions. There must be some other way to cater to these individuals without the use of ads, while still managing to get some benefit from their traffic.

One example, which requires no work on the part of the site owner, is realizing that the fraction of people who are blocking ads probably has a large overlap with the fraction of people who use Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, and other social news/bookmarking sites. So on one hand, ad-blocking individuals are detracting slightly from the revenue stream, while on the other hand, they may be doing valuable work to promote your site to others.

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