I have to wonder how much damage the adoption of Firefox and some of its addons is doing to the Internet. I’m thinking specifically of one of my favorites, Ad Block Plus. Simply put, it prevents just about every ad from appearing on any page I visit.
As Firefox’s market penetration increases (it’s at about 23% now), or if add-ons like Ad Block Plus become available for Internet Explorer, that has to worry advertisers and those who depend on their money.
The same problem exists, of course, with TiVo and other digital video recorders, where you can easily fast-forward through commercials. (My Verizon Fios DVR, like some others, even has a skip-30-seconds button.) But with that you have to take action to skip the ads, you can’t skip if you’re watching in real time, and sometimes you forget or just don’t bother.
With the Internet, Firefox, and Ad Block Plus, you don’t have to take any action beyond installing the add-on. You simply never see an ad again. It doesn’t substitute a blank box; it removes the ad and its space altogether and the remaining page content just fills the gaps. It’s invisible.
Imagine a free DVR that could automatically detect and remove commercials with 100% accuracy. Imagine 23% of people had it. What would that do to television advertising?
With television, one (partial) answer has been the shift to paid content — basic cable, premium subscriptions, pay-per-view, etc. And radio of course has Sirius/XM. Pay-for-content works there because you don’t have millions of options. You have 20 or 50 or 500 channels, not uncountable Web sites. Anyone can publish on the Internet, but not anyone can broadcast to your living room. (Yet. But the Internet-TV convergence is another story.)
Also, because TV and radio are one-way media, the revenue model is solely dependent on involuntary exposure to the ads. But the Web is two-way, and the model there depends on A) that involuntarily exposure, followed by B) voluntary clicks. And the weight is more and more on B — the click-through counts, not the view.
Toyota doesn’t know whether or not I fast-forward past its television ads; I still count as a “viewer” if I watch the show it sponsors. But online, Firefox and ABP prevent me from seeing the ads and thus prevent me from clicking. If a site gets paid by the click (not the view), I become a freeloader — I don’t even give myself the option to click.
Right now 23% of Web users are freeloaders like me (or are a click or two away from becoming such).
There was talk at one point that digital video recorders would prevent viewers from skipping the commercials. Maybe it will happen someday. But it can’t happen on the Internet. I think I can safely predict that there will always be a simple and free way to keep it ad free.
So how can ad-supported Web sites survive? Answer: They can’t. Something else has to take its place.
What else? Paid subscriptions. Maybe ad-watching requirements (i.e., forcing users to view ads before delivering the content). Or something else.
But the bottom line is this: We’ve always had professionally created free content (or in the case of print media, very inexpensive content) because of the unspoken and un-ignorable agreement: We would have to deal with the ads in newspapers and magazines, and on radio and television. Those ads paid for the content. Without revenue, you don’t get content.
You can argue, as many have, that professional content-creators will simply disappear — newspapers and other news organizations won’t be able to sustain themselves. So what’s going to take their place? Bloggers?
Who’s going to create and produce television shows? The Lonelygirl15 guys?
It takes money to consistently create great content. Anyone can occasionally do a great thing; browse through YouTube and you’ll see some wonderful shows that rival anything on network TV. But those people can’t make a living at it; they do it for love or for fun.
I don’t want to have to rely on getting my news and my entertainment from people who do it for fun. You can’t count on them, and they certainly can’t produce the kind of quality that a well-funded organization can. You’ll have Lonelygirl15, but you won’t have CSI. Or Battlestar Galactica. Or Scrubs.
So what’s going to happen? Easy, I think. An Internet without advertising can only have two kinds of content: free and paid. The free stuff will be what we have today, and a lot of it is great. But the professional stuff is more and more going to end up behind the green curtain — subscription only.
Heck, that’s not new. That’s the way movies work. If you want to see a first-run flick in the best possible venue, you have to pay for it. So why not “If you want to get the news when it happens instead of waiting, you’ll have to pay for it”?
What will survive? Big newspapers? CNN? Small-town papers? Dunno. Depends what people are willing to pay for. That’s what the market is for. But I can foresee a day when the free ride is over and you’ll have to pay if you want the latest news.
Which means you end up with the haves and have-nots — people who pay for the latest and people who have to wait for it to trickle down… but that’s another story.
The Fray
ARgh says:
If websites which get paid per view will still get their money, they I don’t see what the difference is if you install Ad-Block software or not.
Lets face it, if you install software like Ad-Block, your never going to actually click on any of these ads anyway. I certainly don’t, if i want something i’ll search for it myself thanks!
So by using ad-blocking software, I’m simply reducing my bandwidth usage and making my browsing experience nicer.
AP says:
+1 for ARgh’s point. And let me ad my own: ad supported content is in a race to the bottom (reality TV, Demand Media, ehow etc). By installing Adblock or avoiding to click on or look at ads we are protesting this downhill slide and fostering a transition to a better model. Subscriptions are not viable for a medium with a billion channels, nor I am willing to subscribe to some arbitrary compilation of sites as I am supposed to do with cable channels (the reason why I don’t have cable). Give me micropayments through a middle man that makes the transaction painless, reasonable rates and my wallet is open and waiting. Google has a revenue of 10 cents per search, Facebook about .05 cents per pageview: wouldn’t those be fair prices?
Cullen King says:
The problem with ARgh’s argument saying CPM ads (charged per thousand ads served, not clicks) won’t be impacted is false: if everyone runs adblock or something similar, CPM goes down. So, a site that gets 1000 visits a day now has to get 2000 visits a day to make the same money, which isn’t sustainable.
Ad supported content isn’t necessarily a race to the bottom. There are many advertising models that could work for both the website and the viewer. For example, what if you have an ad inventory of only items that are on sale? Say your website caters to cyclists, and your ad inventory is only cycling gear that is marked down from retail price. If the ad isn’t otherwise obtrusive, I don’t mind seeing a good deal in my niche that I otherwise wouldn’t have been exposed to.
Of course, this works much better on niche sites, and less on pages such as CNN and others with a broad content base.
Steven Rumbalski says:
I use Ad Block Plus and therefore do not see ads. Why? Ads are annoying. Ads eat up my limited dsl bandwith and bog down my 6 year old computer.
There’s one easy way for advertisers to serve up ads to Ad Block Plus users. Have the website that the ad appears on serve up the ad. Ad Block Plus blocks content from certain urls. It couldn’t do its job if the servers that serve up the content also serve up the ad.
Of course that solution makes some things much harder for advertisers. How do you measure clicks? How do you update ads? etc. But surely some software guru could make an apache/iis/whatever plugin to handle the details.