an ad blocking compromise?
jacquesm: Wow, it seems to be ad-blocker day :)Yours seems to be a pretty well reasoned idea, I think it was Patrick that first suggested that ads in fact function as a micropayments service.I think the whole adblocker debate is overrated, after all it's not like everybody is using an adblocker, it's just a percentage of the users. And if your business suddenly fails because of that percentage then you didn't have much a business to begin with.Starting a service on 'eyeballs' is like working with an unwritten contract that you expect the owners of those eyeballs to honour. But they weren't party to the negotiations, and if they disagree they can simply erase that part of their screen, and really, not much is lost.After all, those ad-conscious enough to use a blocker are probably not exactly the people that would have clicked those ads to begin with. And most ads nowadays are performance based so the loss is really not nearly as big as some people make out.Blaming ad blockers for failing businesses is dishonest because it will change the bottom line only so much.A much bigger problem is the fact that a good bit of the advertising market is not transparent to begin with and that so much of the content out there really is hardly worth the bits it is stored on.Videos on news sites are a nice example of where we're headed, non-skippable ads tightly coupled to the content.The web equivalent is an interstitial page that you have to sit through before being allowed to view the content you came for.Personally I have no problem with advertising, as long as it is relevant and not 'in my face'. If I get a negative feeling with a site a few times when visiting because of overly intrusive advertising then I simply stop going to that site.Salon.com is a nice example, I used to read it frequently, since they started their overly intrusive campaigns I haven't been back. Chances are they've reverted in the meantime but I'll never know.As for the blocker-and-micropayment system, I don't think it will fly, people that go for freebies are not going to be turned in to people that pay, no matter how you dress it up. Think about it, simply seeing an ad is already too expensive sometimes.Until they have absolutely no other alternative. And on the web there are so many places to get your 'fix'.