Submission + - I just turned Adblock off
InterGuru writes: "After three years of browsing with the Firefox extension, Adblock, I turned it off. This took some doing, as I enjoy the experience of browsing without annoying animated ads blinking at me.
I did not do it because I thought that blocking ads violates some social contract with the advertising industry. I did it because I felt that I was killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Most of sites I read, including Slashdot, depend on ads for the revenue needed to continue publication.
We all hear how the "mainstream press" (MSM) is a dying anachronism in the face of blogging. Yet when you look at blogs, they are usually responding to a MSM story. In spite of record readership on the Net, the MSM is in real economic trouble as its paper version loses readership. Internet ads do not bring in the revenue that paper does, but it is the future revenue stream.
Well who cares! We all should. Few or no bloggers have the resources to send a reporter out for a few weeks to cover an in depth story, or for that matter, have a reporter sitting in on the city council meetings. If too many of us turn ads off, we will kill off the MSM even faster than it is dying.
I now grin and bear it when a blinking ad disturbs me. I even blink back at it.
Bookwormhole.net — Thousands of published book reviews."
I did not do it because I thought that blocking ads violates some social contract with the advertising industry. I did it because I felt that I was killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Most of sites I read, including Slashdot, depend on ads for the revenue needed to continue publication.
We all hear how the "mainstream press" (MSM) is a dying anachronism in the face of blogging. Yet when you look at blogs, they are usually responding to a MSM story. In spite of record readership on the Net, the MSM is in real economic trouble as its paper version loses readership. Internet ads do not bring in the revenue that paper does, but it is the future revenue stream.
Well who cares! We all should. Few or no bloggers have the resources to send a reporter out for a few weeks to cover an in depth story, or for that matter, have a reporter sitting in on the city council meetings. If too many of us turn ads off, we will kill off the MSM even faster than it is dying.
I now grin and bear it when a blinking ad disturbs me. I even blink back at it.
Bookwormhole.net — Thousands of published book reviews."
