I Am Killing the Internet

Date: 2010.03.12 | Category: Internet | Tags:

Over a year ago, I wrote a post titled “I Am Killing the Newspaper Business,” so titled because I had canceled my San Francisco Chronicle subscription. (Note: I haven’t been billed for my Sunday-only subscription since January 2009. I am a murderer, I tell you, a murderer!) Now I learn that I am far more evil than I originally thought. I am killing the Internet!

I had never visited, or even heard of, the web site Ars Technica until a couple of days ago, when I saw a Tweet linking to a piece posted there entitled “Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love.” Then the site’s editor, Ken Fisher, had a commentary on All Things Considered yesterday called “Why Clicking Isn’t Enough: Unblock Reasonable Ads.” Said Fisher: “If you have an ad blocker running and you load 10 pages today, you’ve consumed resources.”

Here is my confession: I have Adblock Plus running on my web browser. “If you read a site and care about its well being, then you should not block ads (or you subscribe to sites like Ars that offer ads-free versions of the site),” writes Fisher in his article. “If a site has advertising you don’t agree with, don’t go there.”

I have happily paid for a subscription to Salon.com for several years — they introduced their “premium” version many years ago, in the pre-Adblock days. Subscribers don’t see any ads. Even though I could block them now with Adblock, and it’s not like I love every single thing on the site, I still think it’s worth paying a few bucks a year to support them.

However, most sites I visit frequently don’t have that option. So why do I block the ads?

It’s simple: I cannot focus on what I’m reading if something on the page is moving. That goes for scrolling Twitter feeds as well as ads, by the way. I had to tweak Adblock to turn off the Twitter feed on one of my favorite sites, Go Fug Yourself, because I could not concentrate on the words when Tweets were scrolling past in the right-hand column. And that’s a web site devoted to critiquing celebrity fashion — do you honestly think I could focus on a piece on worldwide oil prices by Paul Krugman if a trailer for HBO’s “The Pacific” was playing next to it?

I would never activate Adblock on, say, the Lansing City Pulse web site (a friend writes for them) because the ads are blissfully motionless. However, apparently the “experts” have decided that such ads are not as effective as ones with sound and activity. Sure, it’s easy to say, as Fisher does, just “don’t go there,” but in truth, most people aren’t likely to stop visiting a site simply because its ads are annoying — not when they’re so easy to block.

If I value your content, I’ll happily pay a subscription fee to access it — I’m sure I will subscribe to the New York Times when it erects a paywall next year — but don’t ask me to read something while a debt consolidation ad with dancing gorillas is taking over a third of the screen.