Sky is a subscription model. They get paid via your subscription whether you watch the ads or not. Sky are exploiting the best of both worlds in that they are earning revenue by charging viewers AND advertisers

Smart arse 😛

OK, say I’m watching ITV, and I’m using Freeview+ or even VHS? Is that still as bad as Naptser(sic)?

What about watching a live broadcast on ITV but leaving the room to make a cup of tea when the adds are on?

My point is that it’s entirely your decision to show us adds but its also our perogative to ignore those adds if we want to. Publishers who are used to paper are used to adds being hard to ignore but audiences in the 1,000s. If they want to embrace broadcast content with audiences in the 1,000,000s then they will also need to learn to cope with adds that are easier to ignore.

You (collectively) built an unsustainable business model and you need to fix that in a way that you are comofortable with and makes you money but don’t expect us to just stop ignoring adds out of charity.

Note: I don’t actually use an adblocker but do think it’s obserd to expect people not to.

(It is interesting the the technology exists for PVRs to either automatically skip adds or to force people to watch them yet neither has been rolled out, some sort of uneasy truce?)

edit: Ha ha – Adb1ocker autocorrects to freeloading. I’ve just lost a huge ammount of respect for Singletrack World.

I guess it is a balance and as this is a fairly new form of advertising, it will evolve over time.

If the ads are too intrusive, people will either block them or be put off the products and the advertisers will have to rethink the strategy.

A forum is an interesting one as there are benefits for both users and owners. The users gets a platform to talk with like minded people and the owners have a commodity of XX unique visitors per month. Although hosting the forum costs money, there is a monetary value for the owners too in both advertising and driving far more people to their website than would be possible without the forum.

We have a sustainable business model. I’m sorry if I’ve given the impression otherwise. We’ve actually won an award for our business model 🙂
We already have a paywall. We’ve had it for several years now. What we are doing is adjusting our business model to reflect the changing way the world is using technology and consuming content. We have a new website in grit.cx that will further adapt to the way the market is changing and what we learn there will be implemented over here on Singletrack.

It’s all getting a bit complicated now with the detail so let me bring it back to the OP. If everyone blocked the ads today.. I turn the site off for all but premier users tomorrow and send half the staff home because I would have no money to pay their wages. It is that simple. A huge chunk of our revenue would be turned off like a tap.

How are we dealing with the growing ad-blocking problem? We are developing revenue streams that are not dependent on them. This is working quite well for us. 5 years ago 85% of our revenue was from advertising – Now it’s about 65%. I’m hoping that in a year or so that will be 50/50 but then I can’t predict what will happen in the publishing world next month, let alone next year… so we’ll just keep adapting as we go.. it’s done is ok for the first 14 years 🙂

I want to know when we start getting paid to post, after all that’s what the 1.8 million visitors are logging on see!

(Well possibly)

Believe it or not but we have a plan for that on grit.cx.. No really! 🙂

What about watching a live broadcast on ITV but leaving the room to make a cup of tea when the adds are on?

🙂
not sure whether this is a valid analogy or not but I think it’s a digital thing, back in the day tape to tape piracy was relatively easy to do but didn’t appear to have publishers quaking in their boots, disc to disc again not too tricky but with the right burner you could do dozens at a time with zero loss of quality, whoops people start to worry. Come the interwebz and it being very very easy to share stuff and everyone and his dog at sony were shitting themselves.

@d bl0cking is so easy to do – and is likely to turn into an unwinable arms race – that I guess it makes it scary.

Believe it or not but we have a plan for that on grit.cx

Seriously bad idea, my cats will start wanting a cut each time I post a photo of them on here!

[url=https://flic.kr/p/dS2hjJ]Jeff and George[/url] by brf, on Flickr

footflaps – Member
I want to know when we start getting paid to post, after all that’s what the 1.8 million visitors are logging on see!

(Well possibly)

Posted 5 minutes ago # Report-Post Mark – Resident Grumpy
Believe it or not but we have a plan for that on grit.cx.. No really!

Wehey? Eh?? Wot?

You will start paying US to post on the site?

Really??

C’mon, who wants to read the rubbish I spout?

*hop’s on over to Grit.cx, but waits to be paid before posting!!

Come the interwebz and it being very very easy to share stuff and everyone and his dog at sony were shitting themselves.

HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC!!!1!

I’ve waxed lyrical on this subject before, but IMHO the best thing Sony et al can do to make piracy less attractive is to stop being dicks.

Restrictions on loaning to mates, restrictions to second-hand sales, restrictions to playback devices, mandatory warnings and bollocks every time you install the disc, CDs that break red book standards, time-limited content that expires… you know what, I’ll just download the bugger, at least I know it’ll work when I want to watch it on my laptop at work or streamed to the Xbox.

Better to embrace the Internet rather than fight it, shirley?

Oh,

And embedded rootkits. That was Sony’s piece de resistance, that was. Bastards.

Believe it or not but we have a plan for that on grit.cx..

Do big hitters get a better rate?

this is what I didn’t get about my little 4od foray. I hardly ever watch live TV so I very very rarely have to watch adverts, just seemed a bit of a pisser having to sit through them if you forget to record something and have to watch if on catchup.

You certainly don’t have to sit through them – I never do. Simply start the programme, mute the sound on the player and do something else whilst it plays the first set of ads. Then click the slider at the bottom to each section of the programme in turn and go away and do something else whilst each set of ads play. When you’ve done all that – which only takes seconds of your time – you can sit and watch the whole programme ad free.

How are we dealing with the growing ad-blocking problem? We are developing revenue streams that are not dependent on them. This is working quite well for us. 5 years ago 85% of our revenue was from advertising – Now it’s about 65%. I’m hoping that in a year or so that will be 50/50 but then I can’t predict what will happen in the publishing world next month, let alone next year… so we’ll just keep adapting as we go..

I would suggest that you’ll do much better than a lot of places who seem to be trying to take the same outdated approach record companies did to Napster then.

And fwiw, if you’d not been so daft last time you and I had this discussion you’d have had a digital subscription out of me by now, seeing as the only reason I stopped being a subscriber originally was because I tried twice to renew magazine subs and never got anywhere, then I moved to Oz…. But, as I’m “still not a customer”, I guess I’d better remain that way for now 😉

Not knowing that the Guardian had a club, I might well head over there and become “a customer” to them also