Thank You for not Blocking the Ads
I want to say that I’m happy that only a small minority of our visitors appears to block the ads on our website with an adblocker. 
Without the advertising revenues it would be hard to justify all the time and money we’re investing in Sandra and Woo. After some changes to our ad strategy, which I was able to implement with the data and experience of the last months, we’re now making a nice amount of money each month that way.
That said I want to talk a bit how advertising on mid-sized websites like ours works since most normal internet users certainly don’t have any knowledge about it:
There are currently three advertising slots on our website, the leaderboard at the top and the two skyscrapers on the left and the right sidebar.
To get banners for those slots you have to apply with your website at an internet ad agency. Google AdSense is open for practically every website, but they also only pay per click as opposed to per pageview which is much more lucrative in most cases. Therefore it’s a good idea to apply at other ad agencies, but most of them have strict requirements regarding the content of the website, the number of visitors and the placement of the banners on the website.
A key feature of general purpose ad agencies is that all of them offer the option in their admin panel to specify what to do with the ad slot when they are not able to deliver a banner for it, for example because the visitor is from Russia and none of their advertisers is interested in serving ads to Russian visitors. Therefore you place the ad agency that pays the best on the first position of your ad chain and the others after each other. The fill rate of the ad agencies is depending on their place in the ad chain since the “best” visitors are already taken by the ad agency in the first place. Google AdSense is an exception to that as it offers a 100% fill rate which makes it a natural choice for the last position in the chain.
Our current ad chains look like this:
- Leaderboard: ADSDAQ Leaderboard –> Six Apart Leaderboard –> Burst Media Leaderboard –> ValueClick Leaderboard
- Left Skyscraper: ADSDAQ Left Skyscraper –> Six Apart Left Skyscraper –> Google AdSense Left Skyscraper
- Right Skyscraper: ADSDAQ Right Skyscraper –> Six Apart Right Skyscraper –> Burst Media Skyscraper –> Google AdSense Right Skyscraper
Since there have been many complaints about inappropriate ads all over the internet in the last year, most ad agencies now offer the possibility to filter ads by category. Here you can have a look at the categories we’re currently filtering:
- ADSDAQ: Blocked categories
- Burst Media: Blocked categories
- Google AdSense: Blocked categories (in German)
As you can see I have blocked many categories so that you don’t have to see ads with questionable content. Although that’s costing us a significant amount of money in the short run, I believe that we’ll profit from it in the long run since there’s less of a reason to block ads on our website.
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I was adblocking, but I’ve added you to my whitelist
I block ads as well since I have a strange fear of getting viruses from ads and every time I see an ad it scares the hell out of me. Though some ads look nice. I tend not to block those, including the ad banner that brought me to this site.
They just had a huge discussion about this over on Ars Technica last week. Turns out that a fairly large majority were blocking ads based on a mix of performance (massive increase on page load times and bypassing all of Flash’s crashing and lockups) and privacy issues (dumping tracking cookies on us without our permission is just not kosher by any stretch of the imagination). The annoyance of ads has become a distant tertiary because we’ve become so good at just plain ignoring them. The majority of the rational responses on Ars came down to the basic rule:
- We will whitelist you if you promise to closely screen and monitor your ads and NO Flash.
Unfortunately, flash ads are standard and if you’re not a really huge site that directly talks to its advertisers there’s no way around them. That’s stupid in my eyes, since our own, completely non-animated ads are very successful. While more people click on a banner for a webcomic than on a banner for an insurance company, I believe that there’s still much more potential for funny and interesting ads. Instead of all those animated ads that look like the same advertising company has made them since they all have the same boring look and feel.
Yet I believe the ads on our website seem to be tolerable overall since I have gotten not even a handful of complaints about them in the last year. And, of course, we’re only working with reputable ad agencies.
I don’t use an adblock program due to the fact that if I cannot ignore the ad, then I feel like I’m the one who’s doing something wrong. Plus most people get their revenue with ads on their site, so if they can’t get money, I won’t get the site.
While it would increase load times and prevent viruses in most computer users, I know how to fix my own as well as how to not get viruses and malware. If I site does have many popups and invasive ads, unless the content is good enough, I’ll just not visit the site anymore. It’s like driving on a road, you see signs and stuff you mostly ignore, but if the road has too many bumps and potholes, you’re going to take another road.
Would Project Wonderful ads fit your site, or would they not pay enough?
Thanks for the explanation! That was very informative.
I don’t mind the ‘still’ ads. That’s where I found Sandra & Woo!
I’ll look at them and click if it’s interesting, ignore it if it’s not. What bugs me are the ones with sound and/or motion. Those make me think of telemarketers.
Sorry, animated ads drive me crazy. I’d rather donate to you directly, and will continue to do so!
I found Sandra and Woo recently though one of your ads – can’t say I click on many, but I’ve spotted it there several times on Basic Instructions and was finally inspired to click on it. Then I read through the whole archive.
I used to run a small website with advertising, and have never blocked ads myself (with the exception of some particularly annoying ones, but never with an ad blocker, and I’ve not done that for a long time either). I don’t really understand why some people complain so much about normal in-place non-video adverts; in a perfect world they wouldn’t be necessary but I don’t find them particularly distracting and they’re required to support the site.
Glad to see you’re not accepting the ubiquitous teeth whitening/weight loss scam ads though!
Well, that’s even better, of course.
I’ve never used an ad-blocker, but I’ve been using NoScript for a while now. It is sometimes inconvenient, but it allows me to selectively block scripts on certain webpages. If I’m visiting questionable websites I never enable scripts on those sites. I have whitelisted pages I visit often to a whitelist, including those ad agencies that don’t serve terribly annoying ads (like those popover flash ads) like Project Wonderful and Google Adsense (and now I’ve whitelisted ContextWeb a.k.a ADSDAQ as well since you prompted me).
Addendum: Yes, ADSDAQ does serve popover ads, but even with scripts enabled, either Firefox or NoScript is causing them to fail to pop out of their frames–which makes the ads acceptable to me.
I don’t block ads. What I do have installed is ClickToFlash, a WebKit plugin that keeps Flash from loading unless I want it to.
So many Flash ads just trash my system performance and even crash my browser. GIF, JPEG, PNG, SVG, I don’t care what it is as long as it isn’t Flash.
I donated a little bit recently, but I’ve now also added your site to my whitelist. I’ve gotten so used to having an adblocker that it never occurred to me to not block every ad.
We have NoScript here and for a while I was going through unblocking all ads on the sites I frequent so that the people running them could get their money. Then recently some of the ads seem to have started crashing my browser when I go to DragCave or Yahoo Mail, to the point where the sites became unusable, so I started blocking all ads on those two sites until I feel brave enough to figure out which ones need blocked and which ones are “safe”. When I stopped in here I noticed NoScipt was blocking some of your ads, so I’ve unblocked them. Nothing crashed so I guess those were safe.
I use Adblock Plus myself, but I’ve never downloaded any of the blocking packages, as I prefer to just selectively block single adds that bug me, never had it block anything here yet, and I hope to be able to keep it that way
This is actually my main reason for not downloading the packages, people make revenue advertising for other companies, and I’d hate to be cutting into that profit because I refused to view an add that held some practical and non questionable information. the biggest reason for meh using this is tracking cookies, they were driving me mad, so whenever my computer alerts me to one being planted, I figure out which add is responsible with me firebug, and get rid of the evil thing
so if I click on the ads on your page, do you get more money?
cos it’s no skin off my ……
*clicky*
You know, it’s real sad that because of all the unsavory ad types out there that contain viruses, spyware, or otherwise mess up your computer, one is almost required to have an adblocker to use the internet safely. But, suppose I can see about removing some of the more reputable ad providers off the blocker.
I don’t block ads on this site. What I do do is block JavaScript on all but a handful of sites. It just happens that most ad networks use JavaScript. So, I don’t see their ads.
I am happy to see ads on sites, such as this one, which I visit often. If only you could serve ads from your own domain, or convince the networks to not use JavaScript…
The other issue with ad networks is privacy. I don’t like getting tracked, and thus am more likely to block ads from networks that have a greater reach (e.g. Google).
If there was an easy, non-Paypal, cheap method of micro-donations, I would send a few bob your way. (Due to certain unethical things that PayPal has done, I can’t suggest anyone use them. No matter how wide spread they are. On my own website I do without having a donation button, because there isn’t a good system that works in my country.)
It would certainly be good for us if more readers would occasionally have a look at the sites that are advertised. But clicking too often (“click fraud”) would be even worse.
but anyway.
GREAT COMIC!!!!!
I don’t care about blocking ads specifically. But like some others, I use NoScript to block scripts in general, which seems to consequently block most ads. I intend to continue doing so. My opinion is this: If they want to serve advertisements, fine. But they are perfectly capable of doing it in a way that doesn’t involve running scripts on MY computer. If they opt not to do so, too bad for them. If a website opts to rely on such companies, then tough cookies. Nothing against them, that’s just the way it is.
I could try to sort out which ad companies are decent and which are not, but why should I waste my time on that? As I said, they don’t need to run scripts on my computer in the first place. They could just give you an image to hotlink, and get their data from the server logs. Furthermore, they could give you a link to what looks like an image, but is actually a php page that runs a server-side program to harvest my IP and what-not from the HTTP headers, decides which ad image to show, and then sends that data back to the browser. As far as my browser would be concerned, it would be just grabbing normal image data. I am not pulling this out of my rear. I’m a programmer, and one of the projects I’ve done was pretty similar.
But thank you for posting this. It reminded me that I had intended to make some donations to my favorite webcomics, but hadn’t gotten around to it. I’ll go do that.
The April Fools site was amusing, btw. Few things beat listening to Loituma at 3:30 AM.
I haven’t thought about blocking the ads, mostly because I do so much on my computer that requires flash that to block flash ads i’d have to run the risk of blocking the sites i do go to all the time as well, but once i realized you were worried about us blocking the ads, is when I realized that on your sight the ads have never risen to the level of even being remotely annoying, and i think i’ve even clicked some of them a few times, and another web comic I read i now think they use the annoying ones to get people to pay for membership to avoid the ads, so thanks for the non annoying and at least a few times useful ads, and I found this web comic through a banner ad on another website that I had stumbled upon. Take care
Yeah. I’m not trying to block the ads, I’m trying to block Flash, as it seems to require me to restart my browser after a while. Still, good point. I’ll donate a few bucks instead, as you do need to make your money!
For ADSDAQ, I suggest adding the following to your list of filtered ads:
–Faux Text Ads (No good can possibly come of these. Their only function is to fool the viewer)
–Sexually Suggestive (This one just slipped your vision, I’m sure.)
For Burst:
–Suggestive (Again, you must just not have noticed.)
[...] while visiting our site. If you don’t know why that’s a concern, then you should check out THIS article by Sandra & Woo creator Oliver Knörzer [...]
Just found this site, and I enjoy it.
I don’t use an ad blocker, but I do use NoScript, which blocks Flash and iframes as well as JavaScript. Ad agencies seem to insist on using exactly those techniques that are used in drive-by downloads, and malware has been spread through ads several times already. I tried to see the ads on your front page by temporarly allowing all the page, but apparently the advertisers use so many levels of indirection that after every refresh there are new sites to unblock, even after more than five times the ads didn’t show.
I have other reasons than malware for blocking dynamic in websites. I use a very slow computer compared to modern standards, which I chose because it uses very little energy and it is extremely quit (it’s fanless).
But even more important: ads tend to be animated. When a page contains moving content I find it so distracting that I have real trouble accessing the content I came for. I guess I’m far more sensitive to that than most people, but for me it’s like trying to understand someone who’s speaking in a low voice while being surrounded by people who are shouting at me. I might as well not visit the website at all. I don’t mind ads, but I do mind ads that prevent me from seeing what I came for.
From my perspective, turning off JavaScript is like asking the ad agencies not to shout at me. In stead of lowering their voice they shut up completely. I would be quite happy to see their ads if they would fall back to serving static images when JavaScript is turned off, but that is something they never seem to do.
Hmm, instead of ads, I’m getting a whole bunch of code that would presumably show the ads normally. I’ll have to go into my settings to see if something’s turned off or not, but ads on other sites seem to work just fine :\