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Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

At the risk of stating the obvious, if your site is ad-funded then annoying users who don't see your ads so they go away and don't come back is a win. If they bitch about it to their friends who also wouldn't see your ads and those friends don't visit in the first place, it is an even bigger win.

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I'm not so sure this is "obvious". It presumes that those people will never refer anyone who would watch your ads, and also that search engines won't down rank you in results based on the number of people bailing from your site instantly/avoiding clicking on it.

If you've bought into the lexicon of marketing it is. They're stealing revenue from you.

If you haven't, you're an asshole and you're fucking your users for no reason at all (ads are no reason).

I agree the position I suggested is only a plausible assumption rather than a self-evident truth. Even so, I think it's a reasonable premise. Most people aren't going to use an ad blocker and then immediately leave your site just because of some related message, so I don't see the search engine issue as much of a danger. You might lose a few people who might have clicked on your ads if someone hostile spreads the word around, but firstly I doubt many people are really going to do that either (do you leave a web site and then immediately post on your blog/Facebook page/Twitter feed that "Site X Sucks!!!11!", really?) and secondly even if they do then I suspect the odds of converting anyone they tell who acts on that information are very low.

This assumes you gain zero benefit from a network effect, which is rarely the case.

No, it only assumes that you don't gain a positive net benefit from a networking effect in a network where people use ad blockers and then get upset and storm off your site if you do something about it. In the absence of data to the contrary, that doesn't seem like an unreasonable assumption.

"Network effect" not "networking effect": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

Unless you're building something like a social network or marketplace site, that specific kind of network effect seems unlikely to matter very much.

It seemed like you were confused about the term and or the correct use of the term. The term is "network effect" not "networkING effect." I am not invested in the argument one way or the other. I just wanted to point out how to use the term.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=network+effect...

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