Is Adblock killing online ads? Links from around the web, 15 November

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Adblock killing online ads? start planning for the festive season now and what drives Google’s digital marketer?

Is Adblock having a serious impact on online ads? This week The Economist reported that 9% of all traffic comes from browsers with a plugin blocking ads. This could have an impact on the worth of online advertising space – perhaps if people were more sensitive to the ads on their page less people have to use Adblock.

There are only 39 days until Christmas! We haven’t put the office Christmas tree up just yet, but we’re all making preparations for the festive season.  What can you do to ensure your ecommerce website is prepared for the gift buying rush? SEOptimise have published a guide with some great tips and tricks, get your keywords in order, ensuring physical deliveries are quick are some of the key findings. Are you making preparations for the season?

Google’s “digital marketing evangelist”,  Avinash Kaushik, gave a keynote during the week. He outlined three of his driving interests that keeps him going in the industry, as well as 14 online marketing wakeup calls. If you are concerned your marketing efforts have hit a slump, check out the wake up calls as they could prove to be very important.

 

State of blogging down under and does colour impact SEO?

The state of blogging in Australia was released this week. We’ve been poring over the data and the findings are pretty interesting – it records the rise of the ‘mommy blogger’ (Mommy bloggers have grown to be an influential grouping in Australia, even scoring a morning tea with the Prime Minister!). With 5000 Australian blogs, a whopping 84% of readers purchased a product after seeing an endorsement on a blog. The gender breakdown is fascinating as well with 92% of the blogs being written by women and Flippa’s home state (Victoria) being home to the most blogs in the country.

Interpretations of what search-engine friendly website design is varies from person to person, but have you considered how the colour of your website affects SEO? For example, clickable items have to look clickable. That sounds pretty simple but it can often get overlooked. This is a great article as it highlights issues you might have overlooked when designing your website.

 

Prepare your social strategy for 2013, pages-only feed on Facebook goes live and order your Twitter feed

If you’re starting to plan your social strategy for 2013, knowing what some of the trends are will help. Is Pinterest going to continue to rise? Will Google mothball G+? To help with your forward planning, read this article, which looks forward into next year and provides information on what you can do to optimise your website to encourage social media interaction.

Facebook has rolled out a pages-only feed. This removes all posts from your friends so you can soak up posts from your favourite businesses. It’s a good move if you want to keep on top of your favourite companies, but we’re still waiting for a friends only feed. Will anyone bother to look at a business-only feed?

Remember when Tweetdeck was seen as the most ‘”powerful” Twitter client? Times have changed. These days you can monitor ‘high value’ members/customers of your twitter community to ensure their tweets get answered first, amongst other things. Twitter’s controversial user cap might force these apps to disappear so if you have been thinking about changing client, now’s the time!

 

Flippa in the news!

This week our CEO, Dave Slutzkin, spoke to Hybrid Domainer. Dave spoke about the $100,000,000 sales milestone we’re working up to, and some of the features we’ve recently rolled out. Dave also spoke to Domain Gang about the industry and how we go with our American – Australian divide, and we made it into Domain Journal’s top sales of the week article.

When you’re just starting out online, it can be surprising to learn that websites can be sold. This week, Flippa’s Ophelie Lechat introduced the concept on Tweaky’s blog. There’s nothing worse than a dead website – sometimes you’ve either run out of passion or you don’t have the time to invest in the website anymore. So if you’re getting support requests you don’t recognise, don’t remember the log-in credentials or are moving onto a newer, more exciting project it might be time to head over to flippa.com/sell to rid yourself of that baggage. Do you agree with Ophelie’s criteria?

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  • Colin

    Also blogging about Adblock kinda helps other people discover it so its best to completely ignore the site as now they have more back-links, exposure and serp increases!

    I don't think the type of ads affect the reason for users downloading the tool, people are just sick of mass advertising.

    You can barely watch a video online now or download a song without being hassled by ads.

  • Jeremy

    Well, at least you used “decimated” correctly!

  • Mysterious Guy with a Hat

    I have used Adblock since its inception but disable it on a few sites I support. I would never disable it on Facebook though.

  • Rene

    I used adblock since it was available, and I use it on all websites possible. A few have unfortunately found ways to block content in return, some of which have unique content. Being European, like many here, I have very strong feelings against advertisements. If a friend endorse a product because he has had good experience with it himself or to do me a genuine favor I would consider buying it, but the only ones advertisements are there to help is the seller of the product, why should I consider listening to their message even for a second? For that reason I actively avoid advertisements, and actively avoid purchasing anything pushed through large expensive ads – that I would indirectly be paying for by buying the product.

    • Borgio

      The 9% are not going to buy anything ANYWAY, so it really does not matter if they use Adblocker or not. Who cares what they use?

  • Bishop

    All I know is I have a site that is containing to programmers and gamers. And nearly 90% of our traffic is using adblocker of the 2000 unique views we get 1 click on google Adsense. Ridiculous

    heck if someone knows how to make money from this with everyone blocking ads ill sell them the site for a reasonable price.

  • http://www.ensot.com/ Ramp

    Do You realize that all those website wouldn’t exist without ads? They need money to keep those sites going in the first place.

    If you block them, simply those websites will go bankrupt and You will end up using websites and services who rely on subscriptions and stuff like that, that means, you will be spending money to see/gets stuff instead of seeing ads for getting to that stuff.

    People are silly.

    • http://www.yoebo.com scottbt

      Well said

  • http://www.travelviaitaly.com Julo

    I wouldn’t say it is killing online ads, it is only killing google ads, which is better for websites as the online advertisers will be rather contact website owners and advertise on their sites directly rather than through google adsense. That’s my opinion.

  • http://5uperman.com Dave

    Hahaha I knew as soon as I saw the title that there would be fights in the comments!

    At the end of the day, the website owner spends time and money creating the site, paying the hosting costs etc. The very least you can do is let the adverts display.
    The internet is like the wild west and people think they can steal whatever they like.

    One of my sites has 14% of users who had adblock enabled. I simply blocked these users from the site as they add no value at all. We are a free website. Instead of just blocking them, I sent them to a page explaining why we were blocking adblockers and offered a paid option if they really do not want to see the adverts.

    At the end of the day, it is mostly jealously. Why should a website I use make money from me? Well, the short answer is because they are providing information that you want. In short, if you dont want ads, I dont want you on my sites. That is my decisions as I own the site and it is ad supported.

    Using adblock is like going to a sales pitch where you get a free gift at the end, but I break into the room to steal the gift without seeing the presentation at all.
    People didnt want to pay for access, so sites gave info for free and used adverts. Now people dont want adverts or a pay for access method. They dont know what they want. To hell with them!

    • Ophelie at Flippa

      That’s interesting, Dave. Do you mind sharing your conversion rate on those users who received the “This is why you’re blocked” message? What was their general reaction?

    • steve

      While i can see your point also being in the business of well business, I have stopped watching, reading 99% of all ad’s period. Maybe this is just a first world thing but i either mute and open another browser if it video or if it word ad’s i take a quick look at the site more than 3 ad’s i leave fast.

      In fact unless 5 people i know say check this site out, most of the time i just dont bother staying. Because to me that is a sign that this site may have poor content.

      It will get harder and harder for people with ad’s on there sites and here is, I think the reason why the people that run the site dont set quality control’s for ad’s shown on there sites.

  • Dave

    That is the side effect of many people creating poor quality content sites with the focus on ads, ads, ads and more ads.

    In the 90s and early 2000s visitors knew they had to pay for good content if they wanted it. I saw the trend of more and more sites touting FREE as the key feature thus completely devaluing the web. In 1996 my hosting fees alone were 1200 per month and still made a living after only 6 months in business. I brought money, connections and a CS degree to get started.

    Greedy, unscrupulous, unskilled people running sites ruined it for everyone. Didn’t want to make any monetary investment and were more than happy to bring people’s browsers to a grinding halt with endless popups.

    Webmasters should have kept it clean then. What was the new tactic? Outsourced and automated tools just just spam more because not as much revenue was coming in as new counter tools were introduced.

    I personally enjoy watching people squirm when they get no ad revenue and hope it continues.

    Why? I feel that if someone doesn’t have the skill or willingness to pay to create a site that actually performs some real function or provide some real value they shouldn’t be making money online and have no business even owning sites.

    With programming languages becoming even more powerful and the universities pumping out programmers ad blocking software will become even more powerful and I predict that eventually virtually every ad will be hidden.

    I hope that day comes soon so I no longer have to listen to people complain that their autopilot wordpress site ran on a 2.95 per month host is only bringing them two cents a day.

  • http://www.pcicomputers.com Geo

    I saw this coming…. I asked my customers what they would rather have. Better prices on products or ads that would draw their attention to these products. Although we know sometimes customers do not know what they are looking for and we tend to throw Ads in their direction in the form of Pop Ups or the infamous “WAIT! Don’t Leave this page. If you purchase now you’ll get 50% off!”. Ads are alright as long as they don’t jump into the middle of the screen or pop up in an annoying manner. I never respond to those ridiculous “deals” (which are never really deals). Give customers the best price possible by investing low on CPC and reducing overhead costs and they come back! Service is key!!! You can have the best price but if your service is no good then you will not be successful. Ask the customers that come back and buy from http://www.PCIcomputers.com. Simplicity, good service, fast deliver and “of course” the best prices have no substitute. I admire Avinash Kaushik and have watched almost every webinar or online video he has provided but I would love to tell him and the rest of the Google Gang something.. What ever happened to the old “Free Product Submissions” and why did you take that away??? If you are attempting to rid of the useless overnight eCommerce scams… this was a bad idea!! Google has monopolized the idea of what it was originally intended for. FREE SEARCH ENGINE. It is only a matter of time before that becomes a useless search engine. Statistically, it speaks for itself. Here is an idea Mr.Google find the bad guys and drop them of your product feeds… Obviously not the case here because Google is capitalizing on its new idea that CPC is the way to go. I can’t submit my product feeds unless I keep funding Adwords. Isn’t the goal to make the “End-User” happy? To give the customer the best prices possible?? In Google’s new monopoly, the product search is back to “which BIG company is willing to pay more”. Therefore, raising prices for customers in the process. The customer or end-user is what drives demand and not the other way around. Ads are good but I am just saying it should not be the driving force behind success or finding your customer. Lets give customers the best prices possible and reduce overhead cost by eliminating useless and clutter of over-advertisement.

    Just a thought… Go Adblock!

  • Lewis

    Isn’t the real point that it’s all gotten out of hand ? I mean it’s almost impossible to surf these days without an ad blocker and unfortunately the few sites that do exercise some restraint get caught in the net along with the ad jockey sites.
    I’ve seen a few sites that have taken a bad attitude to ad blocking and restricted their content to people who are prepared to put up with relentless ads – actually it’s laughably easy to get round that if one REALLY wants to access such a site, but frankly why would anyone even bother or care ? I mean – it’s a big web and info is available across many sites, so there’s just no need to fiddle around with any particular site.
    I own a few sites my self, and I work for a couple more which do run quite a few ads, and I would dispute the 9% figure – I’d say from experience it’s probably closer to double that and it’s increasing. The fact is that people are totally sick and tired of web pages with more ads than content, or who’s only real purpose is to serve ads (or worse !), and they’re getting smarter and more informed about how to clean up their web experience. The effect is exponential – someone discovers ad blocking and it works – they tell a few friends – each of them tell a few more and before you know it it’s common knowledge. Can you really blame them ? Hell no – we all know (though I’m sure quite a few wouldn’t want to admit it) that ads have gotten way out of control – it’s been abused to death by people who couldn’t care less about their visitors or content just so long as they can make a quick buck.
    I honestly believe that this business model’s days are numbered – it’ll take a while yet, but eventually there will just be no point in trying to make money from ad based sites because virtually no one will ever see the ads, much less actually click on them. Also from experience I can say with confidence that very few will be willing to pay directly to access most content – if a site want’s to charge then it will have to offer something (in fact lots of things) of REAL value and most of those sites will be very targeted and specialist (web dev tools / plugins etc) – the rest will simply vanish or have to find some other way to make money.

    So there you go – when something’s abused to death then ‘death’ usually becomes the operative word, and there’s no point in whining and blaming the punters when it all goes belly up – it’s not their fault – it’s ours.