The effects you cite are not independent: 'costing them money' and 'denying them revenue' are the same thing, and both flow from 'nullifying their business model.' But lots of companies have their business model nullified (ask BlockBuster). They either find another one or they go out of business and a smarter outfit with a better model takes their place.

If everyone blocked ads, no one would serve them. They would charge for content. This is probably the fairest model for everyone. But content providers like Ars want to mislead their customers into thinking they are getting something for free, so they make their money from advertising: that is, they don't sell content, they use content as 'bait' to attract attention and then sell that attention to advertisers. An ad-blocker is acting perfectly ethically and rationally by refusing to give their attention---after all, Ars is pretending to be free, you can hardly blame the viewers who take them up on the offer. The only ones being screwed by this are the non-blocking viewers, who are forced to give more of their attention to compensate for the blockers.

> 'costing them money' and 'denying them revenue' are the same thing

No they're not. The point I was making is that you necessarily cost them money every time you visit a page, but by blocking the ad, you're also denying them the revenue that would balance out that cost.

> But content providers like Ars want to mislead their customers into thinking they are getting something for free

I think that even the least savvy of Internet users understand the advertising model. No one is "misled" to believe that running a site like Ars costs nothing. They're not "pretending to be free" any more than a newspaper full of ads is.

You're correct that visiting the page does impose an infinitesimal marginal cost. The economics would remain the same, however, if there were no cost at all for viewing the site. The content still costs money to produce. The real issue here is the denial of revenue, which as I said flows logically from nullifying the business model.

Ars wants people to think that they are in the business of reporting tech news, when in fact they are in the business of selling individuals to advertisers. I don't see any notices on Ars explicitly asking people to view ads in exchange for viewing content. The reason is that doing so would confront people with the reality of the site and turn them off, even though many of them understand the ad model in principle. And yes, a newspaper full of ads is also pretending to be free.

If Ars won't explicitly require their users to view ads, then they can hardly complain when people skip them. I have no sympathy.

"Again, if you'd read Ars' post, you would know that they are paid on impressions, not conversion rate."

I read that, but as I said, if they have a higher conversion rate, they should be able to negotiate a higher fee for the ads anyway.

On the other aspects, I guess we just disagree (why is it worse to screw advertisers than ad pushing people)?

revenue from impressions is a speculative hogwash remnant of the print medium and needs to go

The idea one makes money from ads simply by having it displayed is copying a highly speculative advertising model of print (where the effect can hardly be measured) to the web (where you can measure it be by actual clicks) put simply its vaporware of the worst kind, and a business that hedges its revenue on this model is hedging its existence on speculation alone.

The premise of advertising on the web is highly informed by age old print models that have failed that industry and put into doubt the efficacy of anything that is uttered in them.

users have a choice. You want effective Ads on the web, offer the users something,so they wont block you. or go away. effective Ads on the web are to be about incentive.

I own the delivery device, i can manipulate it as i will. This is not a newspaper, i control it, not the vendor. i will do what i want with it. the business owner need to give me a an incentive.

I almost agree with you about the speculative nature of CPM based ads, but there's value in running branding campaigns, particularly for the kinds of companies that advertise on our site (I work for Ars).

It's awfully hard to measure that value in any kind of meaningful way, but brand awareness is worth spending money on in many cases.

I was surprised that Ars is payed by impressions, I thought it is all pay per click these days.

It depends where the ads are running. Ads you see on big content sites are almost always on a CPM model. Fixed price ads (like you see on TechCrunch or TheDeck) are generally based on a CPM rate.

Pay per click ads aren't generally worth enough money to sustain sites that produce content. Aggregators, search engines, social networks, etc, have a much, much lower cost per pageview, and can do pretty well. On Ars, we'd need to average about 50,000 pageviews per normal post to pay the writer for it with something like Google AdSense. And that's assuming that the campaigns AdSense picks are pretty good.

There are whitepaper links and stuff you can get much better CPC rates for, but those generally only work if you're sneaky about them and embed them in content, or make them look like site resources.

Am I screwing PBS if I watch one of their programs and don't give a donation?