The Commercials Commerce

Or, how the Grouse learned to quit blocking ads and embrace the new world order

By Jon Chase Posted 05.15.2008 at 5:00 pm 15 Comments

Argh! Pop-Ups: Photo by Minesweeper

I’m going to be straight with you—if you don’t click one of the ads on this page, we’re all doomed. Maybe not today or tomorrow or next week; but if all those banners and pop-ups and pop-unders and interstitials and nagging floating ads continue to be ignored, or worse, blocked outright, we’re every one of us in a mess of trouble. I’m talking the entire high-flying media world dropping from the sky like flaming meteors. Like it or not, we’re all in an economic cold war. However, in this one, we’re fighting against ourselves.

Allow me a brief and flimsy anecdote: A couple days ago I’d turned off the pop-blocker on my browser to enable the function of some site or another and forgot to turn it back on afterward. After hitting a few more sites I was closing my browser window when I stumbled upon a pop-under ad. It kind of blew me away, like finding a T. Rex fossil in my backyard. Yes, I use the pop-up blocker because I’m aware that some sites unbelievably still employ that completely invasive, obnoxious method for pushing ads on viewers, but it had been so long since I’d seen one I’d kind of forgotten they even existed. Having discovered and quickly fallen in love with my browser's pop-up, ad and flash blockers (as well as my DVR, for that matter), I’ve been enjoying a streamlined, advertisement-free experience. In fact, I don’t ever recall intentionally clicking on an ad of any sort online. I despise most every variety of ad in most every variety of media (though I still have a soft spot for some TV commercials). And now thanks to technology, I can shield myself from the clumsy advances of sausage-fingered marketers.

Yet, watching recent developments in our economy, and feeling some effects firsthand as a worker, I’m starting to understand why companies fight like frenzied piranhas to get a piece of me any way they can. And I now think maybe I have to be willing to let them get in a few nibbles for the greater good.

Once upon a time, all TV and radio companies earned their keep strictly from sponsors and advertising—the unspoken agreement was that media companies would make news and entertainment available in exchange for the chance for sponsor companies to market their goods. It was a winning formula for decades. (The print world is a slightly different story, as consumers pay for periodicals. Nutshell explanation: classified ads were long the bread and butter of newspapers, and for almost all magazines, advertising now largely accounts for any profits, with newsstand purchases and especially subscriptions adding far less income; they serve only to broaden circulation, which in turn generally increases ad prices.) Flash forward to the last twenty-odd years: Basically, companies got greedy, at the expense of the helpless consumer, and advertising began to take up more and more minutes per hour and more and more mind space. Consumers hated it but short of tuning out the world, had few options.

Then the great equalizer, technology, began trickling into consumers' hands. With each major form of media, the stranglehold of the content providers was quickly broken by one innovation or another, and it’s been more or less a decline for all parties involved ever since: Record companies want to charge me $18 for a CD with 10 songs on it, and only two of them good? Fine, I’ll head to Napster instead. Want me to buy songs online, shackled with DRM? See you on Limewire, biatch. Want me to sit through five commercial breaks in 30 minutes? Screw that, I’ll TiVo it and watch it when I want, how I want. And so on, you know the drill.

The effect has turned the advertising world upside down, and has thrashed the content providers and creators in the process. There isn’t a single form of media that isn’t taking a serious clop to the chops (with the possible exception of video games. Hooray!) So right now it we’re in a weird decade-long transitional stage, where media producers are battling in a vastly more competitive market, with fewer resources as ad dollars are spread thin. These traditional outlets are further stymied as ad money moves toward supposedly greener pastures online. Which is where you and I step in.

Comments

tundrasea

Article Rating: 05/15/08 at 5:36 pm

Distracting, flashing, blinking animated ads make it nearly impossible to read the content that attracts one to a site. If advertisers and site creators want people to turn off their ad blockers -- the first thing they need to do is stop making obnoxious stroboscopic ads.

4 out of 4 people found this comment helpful

Luscombepilot

Article Rating: 05/15/08 at 8:22 pm

I've been amazed that micropayments haven't become common before now. I would gladly pay PS a few cents for reading this article, as long as monthly charges from any and all micropayments did not rack up more than about what I pay for cable TV.

2 out of 4 people found this comment helpful

serr8d

Article Rating: 05/15/08 at 8:41 pm

There are zero sites that I would micropay to visit. And, I can't stand the over-the-top ads, either. I do hit the contribution links at my favorite blogs.

If a site owner would simply put a link in the body of the article or essay and respectfully request that readers click through to visit a sponsor's ad, then that I would do. Hardsell? I'm impossible to hardsell.

Look at refdesk dot com as a site that 'gets it'.

Running: Firefox with adblock and NoScript. There. are. no. ads.

1 out of 1 people found this comment helpful

dontbother

Article Rating: 05/15/08 at 9:10 pm

Salon.com's method is that you can view one Flash ad for one day's access. I find that tolerable. However, that may be because I only visit Salon rarely.

In extending this model, smaller sites would be aggregated in some way so that viewing one Flash ad would get you to all the sites. Maybe each site that you wound up visiting could get some individual monetary credit.

There are some sites I visit for extended times that I'd be willing to watch one ad a day for.

0 out of 0 people found this comment helpful

doctorg1024

Article Rating: 05/15/08 at 10:46 pm

The ad-supported business model might not work for everyone. That's fine, there are plenty of other possibilities -- subscriptions, micropayments, tipjars, daypasses, you name it. It's not obvious that any one business model will work for all sites, or even that any one site needs to stick to a single business model. It's the Cambrian Explosion all over again! The outcome is probably unimaginable right now, and when it's over we'll have all kinds of weird dead fauna to look at. The last thing you want to do is stick to a single model because it worked in the dead-tree era -- that way lies extinction for sure. Press on!

Aleatoric

Article Rating: 05/15/08 at 11:27 pm

I wouldn't have a huge problem with clicking on ads (or giving my business to the companies involved) if the ads weren't such god-awful pieces of crap.

Something like 99.9% of all online advertisements are astonishingly stupid, and of the remaining 0.01%, maybe 5% of those are relevant to my interests.

There's a tip that most sites can take from Google (and the like). Simple text, or even clean graphical ads on a site don't offend me. Pop ups, pop unders, shoshkeles, etc. are offensive and stupid. Any business or website that uses these kind of ads *deserves* to go out of business (and they should be kicked in the balls for good measure).

I'll quit blocking ads when the sites quit using offensive ads.

That'll probably take quite some time.

tvillars

Article Rating: 05/16/08 at 12:09 am

The trick to advertising is to get content providers to embed the product ad into the content. Instapundit.com does this from time to time and can almost single handedly move a book into the top 10 on Amazon.

icemaniceman1111

Article Rating: 05/16/08 at 1:05 am

It is true, when instapundit say he liked the gillette fusion razor I gave it a try but mostly I block ads with Firefox, adblock plus and filterset g updater firefox ad-ons, also noscript. No script is becoming more useful as java script ads hang up page loading and are starting to have malware embeded in the banner ads. For users of google and gmail I recommend the firefox ad-on called customize google, this lets you block the ads on google, gmail etc and do other very useful things.

where do you go these things?

firefox

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/

adblockplus

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865

filterset g updater

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1136

noscript

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722

customize google

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/743

Let me tell you --after using firefox with these ad-ons my web browsing experience is a much calmer experience and when I am forced to us internet explorer I feel assaulted on the web and it is quite unpleasant

I am pretty ad and interruption (interruptions are the worst for me) intolerant and watch recorded tv on comcast DVR and skip ads.

when I have to watch tv with ads (rarely, thankfully) i want to tear my eyes out as it is so boring and annoying and insulting and continuity breaking. After a year of no ads on tv and no interruptions, regular commercial tv is almost unwatchable.

sorry guys but I am part of the reason the ads are appearing in the right corner and bottom of the screen during the show.

The engineers at motorola and tivo left the 30 skip button hidden as an "easter egg" inside the remote after they were asked to remove it and you can replace it by following the instructions below. Once you go to the 30 skip button you will never go back to fast forward. my favorite show NYPD blue has 4 4minute ad interruptions... but not for me....8 clicks and the show resumes. it takes me 42 minutes to watch the hour show.

here is the motorola code to remap an unused button to do 30 second skip. I use the B button but you will want to choose one that you don't use.

http://www.pdxtc.com/wpblog/technology-articles/comcast-remote-30-second...

you can also do it on tivo

http://bigmarv.net/how/tivo30secondskip.html

I know that ads support the media but I just don't want to watch them, the really good ads I catch online or see on a best of show, some of them are quite good and the best ones have improved over the 2 years we have been doing this.

cheers and happy surfing,

this letter brought to you by air, breathe it everyday.

0 out of 2 people found this comment helpful

Tennyson Hayes

Article Rating: 05/16/08 at 9:11 am

From my long career in advertising I learned that, contrary to popular wisdom, people don't hate advertising. They just hate *bad* advertising.

Unfortunately a huge percentage of advertising is bad. I DVR my favorite shows and skip past the commercials too. But I do like the innovative approaches by some companies - American Idol with Coca Cola, iTunes and Ford comes to mind.

Coke sponsors in-show interviews with Coke logo backgrounds, iTunes puts the songs up for download and Ford makes music-vid vignettes with the show's stars doing goofy things involving a Ford car. All of this advertising is entertaining and most importantly enhances the experience of watching the show.

What sets it apart is the recognition and respect of why the audience is there in the first place. The ads, well, *add* to the show rather than detract from it. Other advertisers would do well to understand this if they want to succeed in a choice-empowered-consumer world.

On the other hand, when great shows like the CBS comedy Big Bang Theory are produced, I'd be more than happy to pay for them outright and skip the advertising aspect altogether.

2 out of 2 people found this comment helpful

Article Rating: 05/16/08 at 3:42 pm

I'm all for text-based or funny, unobtrusive ads, and click on them every once in a while on sites that make me happy (like leaving a tip!). On the other hand, I use adblock on anything that annoys me too much or bogs down the page-loading. And Firefox automatically does a pretty good job on pop-ups and -unders.

I'm surprised that I've never seen a site nefariously try and get me to turn off my pop-up blocker or anything. For example, if doubleclick.net hosted useful images as well as annoying ads, I'd have to adjust my adblock settings and maybe let some of their ads through.
Maybe I shouldn't have said that. What horrors have I unleashed?!

Anyway, great article! This is the first popsci article that I've dugg.