Yesterday, I wanted to watch the next episode of a series I’m following. So I went to my trusty streaming site for this series. However, upon trying to start streaming the episode, I got a page that said “you’re using adblocking software, please don’t, we need the revenue”. Well, fair’s fair, I am using adblocking software, and I don’t begrudge them advertising income. so I turned it off. My mistake.
The episode did start, but halted every 5th second or so, due to laoding problems. That I found out after I had found the episode — it was hiding behind several overlay ads. So, in order to be a decent netizen for this site, I was forced into a state where the site’s actual content was hard to find, and impossible to enjoy.
That’s of course a big bye bye. But it got me thinking. The reason the site needs advertising revenue is, obviously, to pay for bandwidth. By using and adblocking filter, I am not using bandwidth that would be wasted on me. So the effectiveness of their ads increases if I use adblocking software, while the average bandwidth usage per visited page decreases.
That’s even not investigating the advertising revenue model. If it’s based on click-throughs, forcing them on my screen will only annoy me and cost you bandwidth. If it is based on number of views, well, then if I were an advertiser, I’d want some numbers on how number of views corresponds to number of visits to my site or sales. That ratio is going down again if you force it on people using adblocking software.
So there will be a negative effect to forcing visitors to turn off their adblocking software. Nevertheless, I would guess thain the current situation, this is more than offset by the positive effect of more advertisement views. Then again, as an advertiser, I would prefer to spend my money on people that will buy as a result of the ad. That would be the 100% perfect spending of advertisement money (unless you’re trying to establish a name, of course). Makes you wonder if in this Digital Era, perhaps advertisement models will evolve to be more and more precise/finnicky about this.
Curious to hear your thoughts!