Internet adverts to be replaced by pay walls on all Web sites in future?
Advertising is key to how a big part of the Internet works at the moment. Without it, few sites could continue to exist, including Blorge and most of your other favorites. Which makes the increasing popularity of advert blockers a worrying trend for the millions of sites who rely on revenue gained from advertising merely to exist. Could this trend mean the end of advertising as we know and the introduction of pay walls?
Most Web sites on the Internet operate by monetizing with adverts and using the revenue gained to either barely break even with bandwidth costs or to make significant amounts of profit. Either way, advertising is key to how the Internet works and without it the number of worthy Web sites would be reduced significantly.
Adblock Plus is a popular app used as an add-on for the Firefox Web browser as well as a number of other smaller browsers. It has the ability to block most of the advertising on Web sites, possibly improving the user’s experience but harming the site owner’s chance of making much-needed revenue. On hearing that many people ask, “Where do I sign up?” but the problem is that if everyone does that most of these sites will have to evolve.
The problem is explored in an article on Windows IT Pro, which predicts that in five years time all browsers will block Internet advertising by default. It’s a controversial way to frame an important issue which could affect Webmasters right across the Internet, but the article brings up many good points.
All the while only a small percentage of people use these ad blockers there isn’t a problem. But if that percentage became the majority, which could happen if the major browser manufacturers started including them as a default feature then we have a problem. At that stage Web sites which currently rely on ads to pay the bills, bills which can mount for the most popular sites, will have to take a different approach. The choice could be as stark as moving all content behind a pay wall in the same way online versions of newspapers are increasingly doing, or disappearing altogether.
I don’t believe that most Web browser manufacturers will head in this direction because most are the exact same companies which make money from Internet advertising. The obvious example being Google. But it’s a trend that should be watched nevertheless.
Could the Internet be moving towards being a much more controlled environment where everything has to be paid for? That’s the only future I can envision if advertising is taken out of the equation. And while obtrusive ads can be annoying, being asked to pay to access all your favorite Web sites would surely be more annoying.
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August 9th, 2009
If ad blocking became mainstream, website designers could fight back by designing their pages to detect whether you have viewed the ad before the content is displayed.
I used to run an ad blocker but with high speed unlimited broadband I don’t see the point now. What I do use is a flash blocker due to the number of badly coded flash ads that max out CPU usage and slow everything else down. I also find those hover ads that your have to click to close very intrusive.