Why Clicking Isn't Enough: Unblock Reasonable Ads

Ken Fisher is editor-in-chief of Ars Technica, a role he has filled since inviting friends to join him in creating the site in 1998 while a graduate student at Harvard.

Everyone knows the Internet is chock-full of great information, opinion and community. What everyone doesn't know is that blocking Internet ads can truly hurt the Web sites you love. If everyone did it, a big part of the Internet would soon be gone.

Many people believe that if they never click on ads, then blocking them won't hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most ad-supported Web sites are primarily paid when an ad is viewed.

If you have an ad blocker running and you load 10 pages today, you consume resources. Sure, bandwidth is a pittance for one user, but multiply that by a few million, and it gets expensive. Imagine a business where 1 out of every 3 people you served costs you money without generating any in return. Now imagine how much better service you could provide were this not the case.

That's why you have to think about the sites you love. Blocking ads on those sites can be devastating. I am not arguing that blocking ads is stealing. Yet it can indirectly result in people losing their jobs. It can result in fewer articles, videos and chats for you to enjoy. And it can definitely affect the quality of content.

It can also put sites into an advertising death spin. As revenues go down, many sites are lured into running horrible advertising like pop-up ads. Or their pages explode with ad units all over the place. If a site has advertising you don't agree with, just don't go there. Vote with your page views and tell the site operators why you are leaving!

Online, everything is 100 percent trackable and is billed and sold as such. On TV, advertisers don't know if you're muting the ads or grabbing a snack. That's why they try to make catchy ads and pay for potential results. Online, every single ad loaded matters.

Now obviously, this isn't all the user's responsibility. Advertisers and publishers have got to get serious about creating a better experience. They need to recognize that if they offend, they are fueling future ad blocking.