I think we need to get in a dialogue with advertisers about new models. And I have always believed the new model is sponsorship. With a coupon or something to prove you bought the product.

I guess I should ask, do you believe there is some implied social contract that should validate content supported by ads? Magazines and TV advertising are primarily about brand building since it’s a one way interaction, we cannot “click through” an ad in Maxim magazine. But why is there an expectation that we should interact with ads on a website just because the content producers have deemed that to be the correct monetization scheme. I’m sure CenterNetworks generates enough traffic that the advertisements could be sold at a fixed cost to advertisers looking more for brand building as opposed to direct response action which is traffic levels where that majority of blogs dwell.

Rather than trying to guilt trip readers why not go the Wall Street Journal route and go the paid subscription route? Sure you will lose readers, probably a lot if paying the bills and sustaining your business is more important than having your opinions heard, but would you rather have 5,000 who appreciate the quality of your content enough to pay for it, or 50,000 that read it just to put off doing work for another 10 or 20 minutes?

Like I said, I was wrong to say CenterNetworks has no business model, but your own frustration with the very audience you depend on seems to indicate you have chosen the incorrect one.

However, when I do find something in an feed interesting, I make sure to click through to the original article and then link out from there rather than clicking a link directly from the feed. This way, the blog I’m reading from at least gets a page view.

Unfortunately for the bloggers, I’ve never bought anything from an ad. When I need something, I search for it and go directly to the ecommerce site.

Allen, aren’t you the one who has proposed paying for feeds? Wasn’t it something like $1.00 per month? Personally, I’d gladly pay for feeds. However, $1.00 is simply too much. I currently subscribe to 73 feeds. I’m NOT paying $73 per month for them. They aren’t that worth. However, I’d pay $.10 to $.20 cents per month for them.

Small change? Yes it is. But it’s $.10 to $.20 more than you will ever get from me with ads. Multiply that by the the (tens of?) thousands of other readers just like me and you will make some significant money.

My thoughts on ads, I can see where you are coming from in your video (Brooklyn – j/k). I also don’t use an adblocker, even though I must admit that I briefly experimented with NoScript last week and did notice that all websites load a lot faster without ads, I also got annoyed because I had to enable scripts for each website.

Then, ask yourself who are those people running an AdBlocker? I don’t want to call them power users because that makes them bigger than they are, but they are not the overage Internet user. Your blog just tends to attract people in a certain space and unfortunately (for you and others) those people are a bit more tech savvy than the rest of the crowd and know how to install an adblocker.

Anyway – ads, the problem I see are those useless monkey ads (and similar) all over the net. They annoy me as well, I can see why people resort to blocking them. And from the perspective of someone running a website they also annoy the hell out of me. Because they make my website look bad/cheap (just by content and design) and they also make the website load slow.

Generally, I like advertisments – when done well. Unfortunately most of the ads online are the opposite.

The opposite, useless, because they do not provide any value to me as a user. For example, why do I want to sign up for University of Phoenix, or why do I have to hit three monkeys on an ad? Or shoot a chicken? I could go on and on, the bottom line is: I see no reason to watch and interact with those.

On the other hand, if an ad is interesting, of course I click on it and check out a website.

The larger problem (IMHO), is that for most websites it is hard to monetize their traffic with meaningful advertisement, and also to offer a great diversity at the same time. Or why would you want people to click on the same ad which they have already seen a dozen times?

Last night I saw an ad for a jQuery cheatsheet and registered with dzone.com in order to get it. I bet that’s a lead of some kind and I interacted with them because there was something I wanted from it.

Another example is, that when I am on SourceForge, Slashdot, etc. and see an interesting ad, of course I click it. The reason, I am the audience. And it’s not a super annoying monkey ad but maybe something I am interested in.

Sometimes I even click the ads on Google if they look more straight to the point as in what I was searching for then any of the search results suggest.

Now, coming to your point – supporting websites by clicking on their ads. I am sure that would be nice, but I also don’t have the time to do all that. If I’d click on ad on every website which I think deserves it, I wouldn’t be able to do anything else in the day.

Maybe think about this – donating for opensource software seems to work pretty well. Personally, I have donated for various projects. Again, I may not be the average here but there are people who do it.

I think of projects where people request 10k to work on a new feature over the summer and it does not even taken them a week to get that in in donations. There is an easy trade in services, or what people want. He works on feature X which a couple people want. The parties donating are pretty diverse, individuals and companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, etc..

Coming back to blogs in generally, I personally, I also wouldn’t mind a subscription service.

And RSS feeds? They are a huge convenience to me. And I think your conclusion is off here, would people read the site if there was no RSS feed – probably not or not that often.

Judging from my personal experience (= workload during the day), I rarely make it on all the websites that are of interest to me. Luckily I have a feed reader and can catch up with them when time permits. If I would not have that, I would not read them period.

Last but not least, you say that something needs to be done in order to continue the growth of online advertising. I don’t think that is exactly the case. Online advertising is already more effective (in terms of costs and leads) than almost any other advertising (tv, magazines, cars) and more money will go in there regardless if people have an adblocker or not.

Anyway, need to come to an end. :) Great video, Allen!

I do agree though that if the site has questionable ethics or positions, then no clickthrough rate might win over an advertiser.

It’s sad that a few baddies can move people to block and/or not interact with ads. A simple click a day would do wonders overall.

I have 113 feeds that I subscribe to in Google Reader, and there is no way I could check those on a regular basis.

Additionally, you have left out the fact that people are beginning to put ads in their RSS feeds. If you are custom coding your site, you can do this fairly easily. If not, I’m not sure about what blogging softwares will allow you to do this, but if you pass your feed through FeedBurner, you have the option of enabling Google Adsense.

I’m not sure how most people go through their RSS readers, but I browse with Google Reader, and when an item is interesting enough I open it in a new tab to read in full when I’m done going through all of my unread items.

Nice post; you inspired me to click on one of your ads.

The problem with ads on tech sites is that they are all the same, and you tune out after a while. There’s nothing compelling or interesting, and I think the standard 125×125 block hurts tech ads even further. You can’t market a complex product in that amount of space and get people interested.

I think the above commenter (sorry, too lazy to look it up) who was talking about corporate sponsorships meant a solo sponsorship, not an ad. I bet every single person who reads tech blogs knows who sponsors Robert Scoble. I also bet they know who was sponsoring Shel Israel, even if that’s mostly because of the puppet parodies. I don’t even have to think to remember Scoble’s sponsor, but I can’t name a single one of the advertisers on TechCrunch or any other tech blog.

So I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t even think it’s the ads themselves or the revenue model, but the format