Ad-Blocking And Subscriptions

Ars Technica recently pulled a publicity stunt by making their content inaccessible to those using ad-blocking software for a few hours.

They try to make an argument that ad-blocking is bad for the sites we love blah blah blah and that they try to make sure only “good ads” show up on their site.

First of all, there are no good flash ads (which ars does have). Flash ads are disrespectful to say the least. It’s not just that they are visually annoying and purposefully destroy focus which is something that’s not always easy to achieve and maintain. But the most evil thing is that, for no good reason, they trash your laptop’s battery, use up insane amounts of CPU and make your system less stable, occasionally even crashing your browser.

But even assuming you’re running flash-blocking software or removed flash altogether from your system (a good security practice), what about the rest? Any site that uses pop-ups should be banned from the internet as far as I care. It’s just wrong to open a new window without the user’s consent – and asking for it would be incredibly annoying. Than there are those bright colored, blinking GIFs saying I’ve won something or whatever. Those are just frauds and those responsible should simply be arrested. The only ads that most (many? some?) people accept are google’s text ads, both because they are occasionally (some people say often) relevant and they generally don’t disturb their reading.

Subscriptions are a tricky thing for news sites. Many of us get our news from aggregators like slashdot, reddit, digg, google news or whatever. Which means we get one story from site X and the next one from site Y. We’re constantly using different news sites thanks to the news aggregators. Thus, paying for a site take makes up only a small percentage of your total reading does not sound like a very good proposal.

That said, I could see myself paying for news, provided an excellent experience:

– fast-loading ultra-clean interface (with niceties such as allowing white text over black background)

– awesome iphone (/ipad) app and netbook-optimized version, other such as archives in PDF format

– keeping track of what I’ve read, showing me only what I haven’t read

– good suggestions (if I like story A I will probably like story B), related news, follow-ups

– integration with the services I use such as instapaper, evernote and twitter

– great content

But even with this I figure $1-2/month would be the sweet spot. In which case I would probably subscribed to 3 or so different sites. Are the economics for this possible? I have no idea. News sites get paid for merely displaying ads. How much do they get from each reader? Can that be balanced by $1-2 subscription? Ars Technica currently charges $5 for a monthly subscription to their site. That’s way too much for me (and for what I get in return from Ars).

Soon, tablets/e-book readers will become ubiquitous (or so PC manufacturers, Apple, Amazon and others expect). This will increase the consumption of media by the masses. At the same time, major news outlets are re-considering pay-walls. Greater demand vs Lower supply? Will the pay-walled news sites be once again forced to tear down the wall? Interesting times for media and media consumers.

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