// March 7th, 2010 // No Comments » // p2p
p2pnet view P2P | Advertising:- “I am embarrassed for P2PNet. It begs for money in public like a beggar on on a street street corner looking for hand outs. I see you have only managed to cheat your readers out of $13.01 this month. Does that not tell everything you need to know? What are your figures? 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 a month? You should do what yu keep promising to do and shut P2PNet down. People see it for what it is.” The comment above went up about 10 minutes after I posted the second ad on the right. And whoever wrote it seems to have been so upset s/he was stuttering —- “on on a street street”. Since s/he asked, and because it meshes in with an interesting email from Devil’s Advocate on the subject of metrics, in January, according to Awstats, of 244,010 visits to p2pnet, 140,622 were uniques. This time last year it was a lot more than that. But shit happens, as they say. Late in 2009, I moved from a host in the US to a host in Belgium. But because of a huge mix-up at Go Daddy, it took eight days to complete the transfer and during that time my Google rank plummeted from 6 out of 10 to zero, and my stats went down to 2,000 or 3,000 a day. I have no idea why the lost eight days had such a dramatic effect, but they did. By February the rank was back to 6 out of 10, and traffic is slowly re-building. One week into March, I’m averaging 6,230.71 uniques a day, says Awstats. Last month, the average was 7,799.18. Of ‘downward spirals’ If you’re consciously and deliberately communicating with other people, as I am, obviously, 100 visitors are better than 10. But to a lot of people, traffic counts don’t matter. They’re bloggers so they blog. To anyone who depends on the number of clicks each advertisement on the site produces, though, the amount of traffic isn’t only important, it’s vital —- although I wonder what it’s really worth to the advertisers. If 1,000 people click on an ad, what does it mean? Gargle, or someone like it, large or small, and the owners of the site carrying the ad get paid, and data used for creating databases and behavioural targeting are gathered. But how many of those clicks actually generate a hard sale, or even an inquiry? A couple of years ago, “Advertisers believe it’s carved in stone we’ll continue to buy their ‘product,’ which increasingly looks the same, sounds the same, smells the same and tastes the same, no matter how they treat us”, I said in p2pnet , going on > > > But we’re not buying it, in any sense. The print and electronic media as they used to exist, and as they still exist in the eyes of most people who are in charge of them, aren’t merely in the doldrums: they’re dying. And it has nothing to do with the “weak U.S. economy”. The “downward spirals” and “tumbling advertising revenues” are due to the fact consumers are customers again, and discerning ones at that. The cheap tricks routinely used by the advertising, marketing and promotion industry just don’t work anymore. The Net is to blame. It’s having a major impact on traditional advertising and news delivery systems because as more and more men, women and children open online accounts, they’re increasingly becoming their own media providers on an individual and group basis. So who needs the heavily biased, often inaccurate, advertiser-controlled corporate press and their allied ’services,” as they are at the moment? Who? And how? “One thing I’ve never truly delved in was the way various ads generate revenue for a site”, says Devil’s Advocate in his email, going on > > > I always assumed that, in the simplest model, an advertiser paid a percentage based on “unique visitor” page view count, collected by the servers of the sponsored site, and “click-throughs” were an additional “bonus”. Now, I’m wondering if I’ve got it wrong about WHO collects this count, and HOW it’s obtained. The reason my query is, after coming across this at Ars… http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/03/why-ad-blocking-is-devastating-to-the-sites-you-love.ars … I’m confused at to why using an “ad blocker” would screw up a site’s ability to report a true count to its sponsors, unless these advertisers are actually collecting the information themselves, directly or indirectly, through a “trusted 3rd party” arrangement. The other thing that comes to my mind (and that I don’t see reflected in the many comments Ars got for this post)… Isn’t one of the key reasons for using an ad blocker to PROTECT the user from this type of 3rd-party activity?! And, is Ars attempting to dish out a “guilt trip” to its readers, hoping they’ll all just turn off the ad blockers or whitelist all the sites involved (thereby enabling all 3rd-party user tracking), just to keep its sponsors happy?? ‘Blocking ads is stealing’ “Adblock plus is one of the great reasons to use Firefox,” said a Reader’s Write as far back as 2007, continuing, “I always install it on others peoples systems for them. They always tell me afterwards that pages load faster, and it’s now a pleasure to browse. As far as i’m concerned, everyone should get firefox + adblock plus + g.filterset.” It came in a story headlined Firefox: advertising thief discussing stand-alone ,or built-in, applications designed to block advertising. “You’ve reached this page because the site you were trying to visit now blocks the FireFox browser”, said whyfirefoxisblocked.com the then new site dedicated to trying to convince us blocking ads we don’t want to see isn’t our right, and anyone or anything which helps us to do so is a thief. It declared > > > The Mozilla Foundation and its Commercial arm, the Mozilla Corporation, has allowed and endorsed Ad Block Plus, a plug-in that blocks advertisement on web sites and also prevents site owners from blocking people using it. Software that blocks all advertisement is an infringement of the rights of web site owners and developers. Numerous web sites exist in order to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads. Accessing the content while blocking the ads, therefore would be no less than stealing. Millions of hard working people are being robbed of their time and effort by this type of software. Many site owners therefore install scripts that prevent people using ad blocking software from accessing their site. That is their right as the site owner to insist that the use of their resources accompanies the presence of the ads. While blanket ad blocking in general is still theft, the real problem is Ad Block Plus’s unwillingness to allow individual site owners the freedom to block people using their plug-in. Blocking FireFox is the only alternative. Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers. “Jeez,” said another Reader’s Write . “I’ve been house sitting for a few days so I watched a few programs on cable. “OMG, I changed the channel every time commercials came on. Who knew I was stealing?” ‘Blocking ads can be devastating to the sites you love’ In the Ars Technica post DA mentions in his email, Ken Fisher kicks off, “Did you know that blocking ads truly hurts the websites you visit? We recently learned that many of our readers did not know this, so I’m going to explain why. “There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won’t hurt a site financially. This is wrong.” Hmmmm. How can that be? “Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis,” says Ars, continuing, “If you have an ad blocker running, and you load 10 pages on the site, you consume resources from us (bandwidth being only one of them), but provide us with no revenue. Because we are a technology site, we have a very large base of ad blockers. Imagine running a restaurant where 40% of the people who came and ate didn’t pay. In a way, that’s what ad blocking is doing to us. Just like a restaurant, we have to pay to staff, we have to pay for resources, and we have to pay when people consume those resources. The difference, of course, is that our visitors don’t pay us directly but indirectly by viewing advertising. (Although a few thousand of you are subscribers, and we thank you all very, very much!) “My argument is simple: blocking ads can be devastating to the sites you love. I am not making an argument that blocking ads is a form of stealing, or is immoral, or unethical, or makes someone the son of the devil. It can result in people losing their jobs, it can result in less content on any given site, and it definitely can affect the quality of content. It can also put sites into a real advertising death spin.” So, “Starting late Friday afternoon we conducted a 12 hour experiment to see if it would be possible to simply make content disappear for visitors who were using a very popular ad blocking tool”, says Fisher. “Technologically, it was a success in that it worked. Ad blockers, and only ad blockers, couldn’t see our content.” What a good idea! Ban readers who ignore your ads! He goes on > > > Socially, the experiment was a mixed bag. A bunch of people whitelisted Ars, and even a few subscribed . And while others showed up to support our actions, there was a healthy mob of people criticizing us for daring to take any kind of action against those who would deny us revenue even though they knew they were doing so. Others rightly criticized the lack of a warning or notification as to what was going on. Ad blockers block ads. But is that all they block? In his email, “The way it looks to me right now is, the 3rd parties are insisting on placing active cookies or engaging in any other user tracking activities (whether direct or indirect), and the ad blockers are preventing these sponsors from doing so, thereby ‘damaging the relationship” between Ars and its sponsors’ ( ? ),” says DA, adding > > > Now, I’m not saying a site shouldn’t have the right to opportunities to earn money, but if my assumptions are correct, this is not the kind of business model I would support. I don’t visit sites that want to automatically connect my machine to a gang of unknown 3rd parties, regardless of what any of them *say* they’re not collecting or sharing. My computer won’t allow this type of thing, anyway, but if I can’t configure my computer’s security to my satisfaction without it becoming a ‘moral issue’ for the sites I want to visit, I would say the problem would be only with their business models, and shouldn’t be my concern. Either there’s something really odd going on here, or I really have to educate myself on this topic. Do you see what I’m getting at? I do, DA. Meanwhile … … returning to the nastygram mentioned at the beginning, “I see you have only managed to cheat your readers out of $13.01 this month”, it says. The figure was $13.91, not $13.01, and the people who contributed did so because they like p2pnet — same as the people who pumped in more than $1,000 last month. Having said that, I think I recognise the style: the post is very similar in construction to others that’ve been arriving fairly regularly over the past few months. But I’m encouraged because they don’t look like the usual troll junque and flames every site gets. Rather, they fit a pattern. Are they part of some kind of campaign and if they are, who’s behind them, and why? Is this just one person with a hard-on for p2pnet? Or is it someone with enough resources to hire a troll to try to minimise p2pnet? If it’s the former, get a life. But if it’s the latter, great! Stirring things up is one of the things advocacy and alternative news sites such as p2pnet are all about Finally, by way of a heads up, one of my problems has been: as a businessman, I’d make a great bus driver. With that in mind, for the last few weeks I, and a net pioneer whom I’ve known almost since the beginning, have been talking about him taking over day-to-day management of p2pnet, while I continue to be responsible for content. It’s looking promising. So stay tuned. Cheers! And all the best … Jon - … .. … and identi.ca More First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi p2pnet – Online advertising and the New Consumer, September 2, 2008 Ars Technica – Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love, March 6, 2010 Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. Subscribe to - | | rss feed: http://-/feed -? - Back to You’ve reached this page because the site you were trying to visit now blocks the FireFox browser , it’s the headline on a new site dedicated to trying to convince us blocking ads we don’t want to see isn’t our right, and anyone or anything which helps us to do so is a thief. whyfirefoxisblocked.com declares: The Mozilla Foundation and its Commercial arm, the Mozilla Corporation, has allowed and endorsed Ad Block Plus, a plug-in that blocks advertisement on web sites and also prevents site owners from blocking people using it. Software that blocks all advertisement is an infringement of the rights of web site owners and developers. Numerous web sites exist in order to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads. Accessing the content while blocking the ads, therefore would be no less than stealing. Millions of hard working people are being robbed of their time and effort by this type of software. Many site owners therefore install scripts that prevent people using ad blocking software from accessing their site. That is their right as the site owner to insist that the use of their resources accompanies the presence of the ads. While blanket ad blocking in general is still theft, the real problem is Ad Block Plus’s unwillingness to allow individual site owners the freedom to block people using their plug-in. Blocking FireFox is the only alternative. Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers.
