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Comment by toddynho | Hacker News Reader

Nice post!

I wrote an answer on Quora for "How much do content producers who are apart of "The Deck" ad network make monthly?" which also gets into some additional details: http://www.quora.com/How-much-do-content-producers-who-are-a...

(disclosure: I'm the Founder of BuySellAds who owns Carbon Ads)

FWIW, when it comes to privacy, BuySellAds (and by extension Carbon Ads) is probably one of the few companies who don't actually do anything we don't tell you about with users' browsing data. We use it for forecasting what's available to be sold - that's it.

We also wrote a handy tutorial that will help folks determine what % of visitors are using AdBlock: http://support.buysellads.com/knowledge_base/topics/how-to-f...

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Keep in mind that a lot of ad blockers are blocking third-party analytics too these days, so measuring an AdBlock ratio by pushing events into GA isn't going to be very accurate.

I display a gentle plea to whitelist my site (http://encosia.com/blog/wp-content/themes/encosia/carbon-ale...) if the Carbon div isn't in the DOM after a little bit. I'm displaying that by loading an HTML fragment via AJAX, so I can grep my server-side logs and see how often that's loaded. I haven't checked lately, but the ratio was huge the last time I did look.

Whitelisting you would also allow AddThis, Clicky, GA, G+, and Adobe. The "gentle plea" just makes your blog (or whatever it is) look annoying and desperate.

That's not very nice. Surely you wouldn't look a real person you barely know in the eyes and call them annoying and desperate for something that trivial.

Regardless, I was hesitant to add the nag, but I've only received positive feedback, e.g.:

https://twitter.com/TweetsOfSumit/status/534623233920598017

https://twitter.com/DanTheOther/status/550807053812252673

But, thanks for your opinion. It's interesting to hear what people think about it.

Surely you'd expect a negative response if you walked up to random people on the street and said "let me follow you and show you ads!" IRL, I'd smile and nod politely, while trying to find a way to leave.

Considering we're talking about people choosing to visit my site, your analogy seems almost exactly backwards. They're walking up to me, not the other way around.

And, come on. The ad on my site takes up a miniscule fraction of the space above the fold and probably less than 1% of the total area of content on an average page on my site. Following people around showing them ads? That's a heck of an exaggeration.

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