I started using an AdBlocker in Chrome a few months ago. It’s not that I was driven mad by Ads and felt a sudden surge of anger within me to use them and “protect” myself from them or anything.
It just happened.
And when I started to use them a few things started happening;
- Popups on all those sites to “buy” an ad-free plan to access their site.
- Popups telling me that they need the ads to survive.
- The numbers
In answer to these;
- Who is buying this and why? This is the old negative billing scams that happened before. You are now paying to go somewhere to avoid being hassled.
- No you don’t. Plenty of sites, millions, survive without ads and they are doing just fine. Find out what your market needs and work from there.
- The numbers, oh many the numbers. This is my favourite part of the AdBlocker – it has a counter of how many Ads it has blocked per page. If you didn’t feel as though you were being bombarded before, this will surely make you feel that way now.
Check out the numbers on the homepages of these sites
CNN – 14
LinkedIn – 3
YouTube – 7
TechCrunch – 6
NationalPost – 11
For some, that’s insane, here is one that is interesting though – Seth Godin’s Blog – 0. One of the most highly viewed and accessed blogs in the world.
