Ars Technica's Ken Fisher recently penned an article about Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love. As an avid Ars Technica reader (via their RSS feed) I take an interest in the health of the site, and as a user of Ad Block Plus I am just just the kind of user to which Fisher is speaking. Here is why I still block ads.

There have been a number of responses to this article, and this gist of most of them has been "ads are annoying. I have the technology to block them, so I do." Fisher's response has been to tout the high quality of ads on Ars Technica. Having never looked at the ads I cannot speak directly to this, but other have labeled the claim as dubious. But, even if we concede that Ars Technica's ads are of the highest quality, there is a follow-on effect from all the ones that are not.

I actually read most of the net though an feed reader. Ars Technica is fairly unique in my feed collection as most of their stories are original content. Mostly the reader points at sites that aggregate stories form around the net (Hacker News, Slashdot, Linux.com, Ruby Flow, etc) If any of these sites or any of the sites that they link t have overly annoying ads, I will want to block them. A little hacking of my browser cache says that in the last 30 days I've visited 350 unique domains for the first time, most of which I will never have any reason to visit again. Those who say, "if you don't like the ads don't patronize the site," do not consider the the huge (and growing) amount of incidental browsing that goes on.

As I said Ars occupies a fairly unique niche, and thanks to Mr. Fisher's rant I have renewed my long lapsed subscription. Their site now stands with NPR as one of two places I pay for news. But that doesn't solve the problem of blocked ads on all the other sites Fisher accuses me of harming. Even if some of them hold to the same high standards the Fisher claims, it only takes a few blinky, noisy, obscene, slow "Bad" ads to convince me that the whole lot needs to be blocked without recourse.

So here is my advice to ad supported sites:

1. Find alternate sources of funding. Subscribers, Premium content, etc.
2. Acquire meaningful sponsorships, and mention them in your contents. e.g. "This story brought to you by example.com" It will show up in my feeds, it is difficult to block, and is unlikely to annoy anyone so mush that they go to the trouble.
3. Demand and promote high quality ad agencies. Third party ads have some real advantages for advertisers and distributors. A third party ad server that could build a reputation for safe, tasteful, ads with little server lag, and who could get people like Ken Fisher to promote their value to the user might have a chance of making it onto an ABP white list.

As a content consumer I honestly feel for ad supported sites and, in general I want to have their business model be successful. With the current state of online advertising, the value of their content does not exceed the cost of removing my ad blocking software.