Look, I hate using an ad blocker.
It keeps website revenue limited, hurting those who provide the content I enjoy. In some cases, it leaves me wondering what I’ve missed – whether something has been blocked or limited for the wrong reasons and I’m seeing a broken chunk of the website I want to read.
For the record, no, I don’t have ads on this site. Why would I? It’s for me. I get a handful of readers a day, and probably 80% of them are bots scraping data, at least. Trying to earn revenue from this site (at least so far) would be an aggravating experience in nothingness.
Here’s the problem: More and more sites (wired.com, etc.) are adding their own ‘pop-ups’ that ask you to turn off your ad blocker. Some go so far as to block you off totally at that point, requiring you to do so to continue to view their pages. I understand – it’s money. It’s what you do the writing, developing, hosting, etc. for. I get that. But so many of these same sites farm their ads off to other companies. Companies that don’t care what you’re looking at. They want flashing, they want annoying, they want to interfere with your view to catch your attention. And sometimes they don’t pay any attention, or do not care, whether they host annoying noises, malware, crashing scripts and more.
I want to turn off my ad blocker. I really do. But until websites provide an experience that shows me advertising without the danger and distraction, I just don’t trust you.
So give me some assurances. If you’re going to ‘alert’ me to my ad blocker, tell me you won’t let it hurt me or make me not want to come back. I know, maybe that’s more to ask than available, but it’s a valid point, and one you should think about.