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Ars Technica got all sentimental today and started talking about having families to feed. They were basically complaining about how some readers were using ad blockers and blocking out all Ars Technica advertisements thereby causing Ars Technica to lose revenue.

A lot of people have a lot of opinions on this – not surprising since a lot of people are still under the illusion that online advertising works. What was actually surprising is that a decent number of people have figured out that advertising doesn’t really work and they laid out their arguments.

Advertising is Broken

Inforift at Posterous wrote a good post and pointed this out -

But here’s the problem with the discussion: advertising is broken anyway!  It’s a mechanism that provides no value to anybody, be it Ars, the reader or the advertisers.  What if Brian and everyone like him capitulated and turned off the ad blocker?  He’d just turn on the same ad-blocker that I use – the one between my eyes and my brain.  I never click on ads.  Ever.  Ever.  Ever.

The intermediate result is that Ars would get paid – but not for long.  The end result is that advertisers will find ads not worth the cost and either take them away or ask for a reduced price …

The key part here is that users are getting trained to block out all advertising, are starting to really dislike it, and are becoming aware of how manipulative and evil it is.

Why do companies think users are still the naive users of half a century ago?

When TV first came out people had no idea of the impact advertising could have and it was a massacre - Advertising turned people into consumption machines. The Internet is rolling all of that back.

1. With TV and print a 15 year old kid sees Marlboro Man smoking a cigarette and decides he wants to be cool like him – So he starts smoking cigarettes.
2. Now, with the Internet, someone leaves a comment that Marlboro Man died of lung cancer and someone else adds a comment talking about how painful throat cancer is. Suddenly smoking isn’t as appealing to that 15 year old kid.

The Internet makes a lot of users smart and smart users can’t be fooled easily. That means advertising isn’t as effective. As people get smarter they realize that it’s best to completely ignore ads – tune them out, use ad-blockers, go to sites that don’t have ads.

Companies don’t want a world of thinking, intelligent people – they just want mindless consumers and that might be why it’s hard for companies to accept that advertising is less effective now. They desperately want to be in the heydays of advertising when you could pay a few stars to smoke and run a few ads and get 15 to 19 year olds hooked.

Advertising can’t be fixed

At its core Advertising revolves around two concepts -

1. Create a need or highlight an existing need. 
2. Link your product with the fulfillment of the need.

Most of the time the need isn’t good for the user and the product that’s supposed to fulfill the need doesn’t really help at all. That means advertising is fundamentally dishonest.

As awareness of the impact and nature of advertising spreads people are beginning to realize what advertising is really about.

Users are beginning to see through advertising

Wikipedia says $150 billion was spent on advertising in the US in 2007. It also has a good definition -

Advertising is a form of communication intended to persuade its viewers, readers or listeners to take some action. It usually includes the name of a product or service and how that product or service could benefit the consumer, to persuade potential customers to purchase or to consume that particular brand …

Commercial advertisers often seek to generate increased consumption of their products or services through branding, which involves the repetition of an image or product name in an effort to associate related qualities with the brand in the minds of consumers.

With the Internet and the spread of advanced communication technologies like Skype you have people getting smarter and making each other smarter. It’s easy for people to tell when someone is ethical and when someone is just trying to manipulate them and they don’t take kindly to the latter.

Advertising works best with naive and stupid people. Smart people shun advertising – they loathe the companies that are trying to manipulate them. People want ad blockers because they don’t want to be manipulated. Any website asking their readers to not use ad blockers is doing them a disservice.

The straightforward thing to do would be to ask users to pay for content – if you think your work is good enough (and Ars Technica articles are good enough) then charge for it upfront.

Why not let people buy what they already intend to buy?

There are lots of things Ars Technica’s users would pay for. First, see how many users will pay for the content (the thing that users go to Ars for). After that look at other options – Why not add a price comparison feature or a coupon request service or a tech deals section and make money off of that?

Whether or not the other revenue streams work Ars Technica need to let their users block out ads if that’s what users want. In fact they should remove all advertising if most of their users dislike it. It’s sad to see a top-notch blog like Ars Technica get so confused on something so simple.

Isn’t making users happy the whole point? Shouldn’t Ars Technica be glad their readers are smart enough to bypass annoying, manipulative ads?

Filed under: Reality Tagged: | lack thereof, utility of advertising