A plug for FurAffinity

[kaysho]

If you use the Internet (and if you're reading this some other way, please let me know how), you know that all that free content comes with a curse: animated adverts.  Granted, your favourite websites have to pay the bills somehow, and a certain big company in Mountain View figured out a great way to do this fairly unobtrusively ... but other

Comments

[megadog]

Surely, ads are only of actual value to the advertiser [or the hosting site] if you click-through them?

Or is my understanding of web-proxying, NAT etc somehow broken?

[toob]

They're of value to the advertiser only if you actually buy something (or spread the word to someone who will).

But the hosting site gets paid based on views as well. It's a good idea not to ad-block on websites that provide content that's of value to you - you're harming what is in many cases their only revenue stream.

[megadog]

I guess if they work on pay-per-views as well as click-throughs then it would be of value. But from what I also remember, the usual ad-companies have 'countability issues' about getting multiple clicks/views from the same IP-address in a short time - which means that blocks of people on mobile phones or behind any other kind of proxy or NAT-device (so they appear to be coming from the same egress-address) don't get counted?

Or have the ad-revenue-counters got a lot better at dealing with this sort of thing in the decade or so since I had much to do with it? I know that a lot of my clients have big difficulties counting "unique hits" on their websites...

[toob]

Why Ad Blocking is Devastating to the Sites You Love

[megadog]

Interesting... thanks!

[kaysho]

Definitely a good argument for extending this concept beyond FA and whitelisting all sites in your ad blocking software by default unless their adverts are consistently abusive of your bandwidth and CPU.

[kaysho]

I believe that the advertiser gets paid by the click but the site you're actually viewing gets paid merely for opening up part of its "real estate" to the outside advertising firm, and therefore gets paid by the load. Even if the site you're actually viewing only gets paid by the click, you can't click if you never see them. And if it's an advert for something you'd actually want to buy, the seller also loses the sale and you lose a chance to get a cool thing.

But it depends on the nature of the adverts and how well they mesh with your interests. If you give me dancing green chickens, I'd block you regardless. :)

And FA is self-hosting, so for them I believe it's just a matter of losing clicks, but that means they can't sell adverts for as much because the loss of the click-through traffic reduces their value.