Personally I haven’t found the advertising situation to be so bad. People are increasingly blocking ads, and ad revenue is on a downward trend, but I’m finding traffic growth (for whatever reason) easily counters it.

I don’t really think anyone will pay unless they are recieving a specific product in return. You can build this into a recurring subscription for continuous access to the site but you need a product that people will buy anyway to get them subscribing.

I have seen examples of subscription working on mobile phone sites where the users are sold programs or ring tones as part of the subscription. This is the kind of incentive I think is necessary as just removing ads doesn’t really work in my experience.

While I was able to create a script that was extremely robust against even the most persistent ad-blocking programs I also found it added a tremendous amount of code bloat to pages.

I’m not happy to see only around 80% of my page impressions result in AdSense impressions, at the same time I wasn’t satisfied with what was required to successfully detect and block people who were blocking my ads, because it slowed down the loading of my pages for innocent users.

When I first implemented my ad-blocking countermeasures it was because my web hosting expenses were increasing faster than my advertising revenues. I saw blocking users who blocked my ads as an effective way to control the growth of my bandwidth needs by driving away those users who offered me no opportunity to earn compensation to offset my expenses.

I still do not like people blocking my ads, and I still view it as theft of service, because those who block my ads are benefiting from the services I provide while denying me the ability to be compensated for my efforts. If someone wants ad-free access to my site they should be willing to subscribe to my ad-free option. I feel, however, that this more as a philosophical issue not a business issue.

From a business standpoint, I just don’t see the business justification I once did to block those who block my ads. Bandwidth and web hosting has gotten really cheap so those users who are blocking my ads are not really increasing my hosting costs the way they were a few years ago. At the same time by eliminating the HTML and JavaScript bloat from my pages by eliminating my ad blocking countermeasures, I’m able to provide a better end user experience and thus provide better service to my “paying” customers (those who allow ads).

Maybe another reason I stopped blocking those who blocked my ads was because I was the only one who had effectively implemented such countermeasures. Thus I had become a lightening rod on this issue. If I had not been the loan web publisher “tilting at windmills” on this issue, it might not have seemed like such a lonely battle. I believed in the fight but felt I might have been harming my site. In effect I was the lone “warrior” on this issue and that had become an unwelcome distraction.