[Closed] Three to introduce Ad Blocking

If I'm paying money for the content I don't want to see a single Ad ever!

Tell that to Sky/Virgin Media.

[quote=Mark ]I'll also add that our classifieds is totally free - It's not sophisticated of course but it does work.
We have a donation system in place with signs encouraging users to make a small donation all over the (literal) shop.
I can't remember the last time we had any donation at all.
You should have had one last week - for a seatpost I donated to someone.

My apologies to you sir and thank you 🙂

So really, we should consider ourselves lucky that it's not doing that currently. It's absolutely what I'd do if I was running a site that was dependent on ad revenue for its survival.

I try and bung in £5 or £10 at least once year for the classifieds.

My apologies to you sir and thank you

Bluff called, unlucky.

Tell that to Sky/Virgin Media.

So the cost of the service there is born by a combination of revenue streams (which stands to reason, any business with a single revenue stream isn't going to survive very long.

Sky etc charge a subscription and still show adverts because the combined revenue is what pays for the service (and profits ofc). So:

If I'm paying money for the content I don't want to see a single Ad ever!

What you're proposing here in effect is a tiered service. A base rate for access to content, and a more expensive subscription to make up the shortfall in lost revenue for an advertising-free service.

You might want to not see ads but if Sky (say) went, "you can have an advertising-free service for an extra tenner a month," how many would seriously take them up on it? Not may, I'd hazard.

Id make a forum that was more easily usable on mobile devices given how popular they are

Classic source of conflict. Why would we do that when that would more than halve our ad revenue?

I agree.. it would be lovely. It would be more usable and just nice. But we'd be poorer.

In fact it's sort of a moot point since I've got our mobile site on my phone right now (testing) and you will all soon get to play with it. We are going to take a big financial hit with that since the revenues for mobile sites are much less than desktop sites (even desktop sites on mobile).

My gamble is that in the long run we'll win - but we certainly won't in the short/medium term.

Well I don't pay Sky/Virgin anything (for TV) as I don't want their content at all! Quite happy to pay a TV license for the BBC though....

Classic source of conflict. Why would we do that when that would more than halve our ad revenue? ... We are going to take a big financial hit with that since the revenues for mobile sites are much less than desktop sites (even desktop sites on mobile).

OK - what the hell is this shit? 😆

"Shopping link added by SkimWords???"

Something that's been surreptitiously added to my PC/browser?

I'm very sympathetic to your reasoning STATO.

Ha! I just switched that on to see what effect it would have 🙂
You see.. Looking for non annoying ways of monetising the site in lieu of annoying flashy bandwidth sucking ads.

[quote=Mark ]I'll also add that our classifieds is totally free - It's not sophisticated of course but it does work.
We have a donation system in place with signs encouraging users to make a small donation all over the (literal) shop.
I can't remember the last time we had any donation at all.

Hmm I gave stuff away free to someone on the understanding they made a donation to this site. Must ask for proof in the future.

Phew - I've not been infected by that last [s]porn site[/s] forum I visited 😳

What you're proposing here in effect is a tiered service. A base rate for access to content, and a more expensive subscription to make up the shortfall in lost revenue for an advertising-free service.

That is what you have already on STW with premium users (which is very good value).

I can't remember the last time we had any donation at all.

I still don't understand why you don't make placing an Ad available only to Premium users....

While you're here, Mark. Why are the sidebars now black? Bit bleak.

I still don't understand why you don't make placing an Ad available only to Premium users....

Agreed.

Why are the sidebars now black? Bit bleak.

Careful now...

Careful now...

[url= http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/is-it-just-me-or-5#post-7517641 ]BLAAAAAAACK![/url]

Why are the sidebars now black? Bit bleak

They had to turn the lights out to save a few pennies.

Oh god, we have those skimword things now like MTBR etc.
Lets see if this works;
Rampant rabbit vibrator.

because there's a campaign due to start on Monday that requires the background to be black. Maserati are back with a new ad for you 🙂

It's capped at 1 in 24 initially so you will only see it once a day. It's a clever ad actually... as ads go.

The classifieds is for all because of the simple maths involved.

If it was members only then it would be a marketplace for approximately 7000 people maximum. Page impressions would be in the hundreds per day tops. The range of products available and the potential market of buyers would be too small to sustain a useful market place.

Sites like ebay work because of the simply huge audience that comes to them. Close off that audience and everything shrivels up. Our classifieds works because it is open to all. We just need to find a better way than display advertising to earn money from it.

skimwords?

I'm trialing it.

I'm going to measure your moaning against the revenue it brings in and make an appropriate decision 🙂

BTW STATO
This..

STATO - Registered: January 19, 2009, and never going to pay for a free forum! I don't run ad blockers either in case you wondered, that's how I support.

Is absolutely fine. It's my job to find the balance so that every user, whether subscriber or just a non paying regular visitor, contributes in a sustainable way to our existence.

Skimwords. Try Spider-Man.

Skimwords. Try Spider-Man.

*flicks a few switches*

aha. those things.

*flicks a few switches again*

no moaning from me 🙂

Skim words are not too bad. It's just depending on what is posted they can throw up some interesting sexy lingerie donut whip sausage monkey hammer axe lube plug.

^ gone and got myself one of them P's.

I subscribed to the mag for several years and bought it from issue 1, but my sub lapsed a few years back when I virtually stopped riding.

sexy lingerie donut whip sausage monkey hammer axe lube plug

Sadly, nothing

SkimWords eh?

Is this a signalling for the return of the Bravissimo ads? 🙂

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Mark, why not make the mobile app a P only thing if it's gonna affect revenue so majorly?
I find the site fine to navigate on mobile but then I have a browser that reflows text properly.
Don't mind the ads either.

Thanks for switching on skimwords and making me waste the last half hour looking for malware on my system. Disguising links to make it look like a poster has put them there. Stay classy STW.

Back in the early days of the Internet, there was plenty of content.. Some sites these days are atrocious.. You have to put up with ads before you can even see if the content is what you are looking for.. And the content is often substandard resulting in a swift back click and a four letter word.

I can tolerate unintrusive small adds, in small amounts, but the kind where you are forced to watch video or listen to audio or get pop ups.. I have no sympathy for.. Aside from being highly annoying, they are a security risk, and as 3 point out.. Use a lot of mobile data which slows thier network down and costs the end user in terms of data usage.

I run ad blocking on all my devices for security and privacy reasons.. Not having to look at as many ads is a happy bonus. Having your isp block ads as well is most welcome.

Are 3 doing it for partially selfish reasons? Of course, but thier customers will mutually benefit.

Very very good news. What will be intriguing is if they roll this out to O2 after the merger ?

I am a Three customer and I biught an ad blocker as soon as it was possibke after the release of ios9. Web sites like the Guardian are so much better now.

I run ad blocking on all my devices for security and privacy reasons.. Not having to look at as many ads is a happy bonus. Having your isp block ads as well is most welcome.
Are 3 doing it for partially selfish reasons? Of course, but thier customers will mutually benefit.

@mike websites only have themselves to blame for allowing (encouraging ?) ads to become so intrusive

Err, is Shine's tech legal? I'm all for giving folk choice, but doesn't it use Deep Packet Inspection and get tangled in interception laws?

Yes but if the end result pay walls is that a good thing? I don't like the way ads have taken over but I also know stuff doesn't come for free. I will live with ads for places I don't visit that often (BBC has video adds overseas for instance) but give me an option to remove them and fund the resources I'm using then that's great.

Personally i don't mind most ads. The ones that annoy the hell out of me are the videos that appear on pages as you scroll down. That has resulted in me not going on some pages now. Independent newspaper being one of the worst

Err, is Shine's tech legal? I'm all for giving folk choice, but doesn't it use Deep Packet Inspection and get tangled in interception laws?

DPI is less and less useful these days as more and more sites use https (encrypted connections), which effectively means DPI just sees random numbers and has no idea what content you're seeing.

@footflaps, yep, but it will be interesting to see if this gets noticed. Phorm who also used DPI a few years back [rightly] got caught in a huge stink. I know the Shine folk are trying to do the right thing (I've met the CEO), but there still seems to be scope to get caught out by RIPA and the Data Protection Directive (and I guess GDPR but I'd have to check)

Independent newspaper being one of the worst

One of ours is all but unusable due to these.

You know you can disable auto-play videos in your browser, yes?

On Chrome, type chrome://chrome/settings/content in the address bar. Scroll down to the Plug-ins section and choose "Let me choose when to run plugin content."

I have *counts* 37 tabs open on my browser currently. I can only imagine what life would be like if I hadn't disabled auto-play.

Yeah I disabled video autoplay in the end but it just annoyed me