Maybe It’s Because Your Ads Suck

There’s been a lot of noise on-line lately from publishers who are getting upset about the rise in usage of ad-blockers by their website visitors.

As someone who earns a slice of my income from website advertising I understand their frustration. Every ad-blocker is one less impression, one less potential click, and might result in your advertisers not renewing at the end of the month.

On the other hand, publishers bring this on themselves, so I’m not feeling very sympathetic at the moment. The publishers are, of course, focusing their efforts on changing visitor behaviour (turn off your ad-blocker!) instead of changing the behaviour of advertisers. Nothing could have better represented why web users choose to use ad-blockers than the case of Forbes serving malware via ads.

I run an ad-blocker. I install the same ad-blocker on my parent’s computer, and the computer of anyone else who leans on me for tech support, because it vastly reduces the amount of actual tech support I end up having to do. Blocking ads means blocking malware.

But it’s not just the malware. Your non-malware ads suck. A lot.

Your ads get in the way of the actual content I came to read.

On mobile, your ads kick me off your website and try to trick me into downloading apps.

Most of the time, your ads aren’t even relevant.

I don’t run an ad-blocker because I’m a thieving website visitor out to take your content for free and stop you from earning a living.

I run an ad-blocker because your ads suck.

Run better ads, and I’ll stop blocking them.