Ad Blocking: To be or not to be
While reading the great daily posts over at Web Worker Daily 
, I really thought I needed to chime in on Anne Zelenka’s post furthering the conversation regarding ad blocking, as started by Noam Cohen in his NY Times column on Adblock Plus as well as his discussion about whether or not it’s moral to use software to keep ads from appearing in your browser.
My friend Andy Beard feels that Blocking Adverts Might Cost You Money and sparks some more interesting conversation when he shares his take on Nicholas Carr’s pondering of what a certain deity might do if faced with the choice of surfing the net with AdBlockPlus at his disposal.
There are many, many ways to monetize ones venture online. Inline ads on websites are only one choice a website owner has in order to try and financially support themselves. All one has to do is look at the phenomenon of businesses like SiteSell.com and all they promote for literally thousands and thousands of site owners to support themselves. In fact, anyone who owns a Site Build It! account knows the mantra of CTPM (Content>>Traffic>>Pre-sell>>Monetize) and that what is most stressed is NOT putting advertisements on your site until you have the traffic (generated by quality content).
To me, all of this means that market forces will always win out over ridiculous edicts from the old media about whether or not the market’s participants are “morally correct” in what they are doing when surfing the Internet. I wish I could tell you how many times, while reading a newspaper, I lamented to myself just how many pages this issue would be with out the ads. If I could get a ad blocker for the newspaper, I would use it in a heart beat. And at the same time, being an entrepreneur, I realize the value of the medium for the small businessperson. A trend I would love to see is a reduction of ads (online or off) and a higher cost for placing those ads.
Think about that for a moment: fewer ads on a page, would surely bring more attention to themselves, and presumably have a higher response rate. Right? Seems reasonable to me. Sure the cost for the business person will be higher, but so will the rewards. Works for me!
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James D Kirk
