Thank You for not Blocking the Ads
I posted a news entry with the same title on 23 March 2010, but since we got a lot of new readers since then, I just want to recap everything since it’s very important to us (including some updated information):
Without the ads on the website, Sandra and Woo would very likely no longer exist. The revenue is mainly used to pay Powree and Lisa for drawing and coloring the strips and to pay for the advertising for Sandra and Woo on other webcomic websites. It would be hard to justify all the time that’s invested in Sandra and Woo (and soon Gaia) if our comic would reach only a fraction of its current audience.
Therefore I’m happy that only a small minority of our visitors block the ads on our website with an ad blocker. 
Not blocking the ads and checking them out once in a while is the simplest method of supporting us financially!
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 much knowledge about it:
There are four advertising slots on our website: the leaderboard at the top, the two skyscrapers on the left and the right sidebar and the rectangle above the comment section. To get banners for such ad 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 page view which is more profitable in most cases. Therefore it’s a good idea to apply at other ad agencies as well, but most of them have more or less 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 most general purpose ad agencies is that they offer an option in their administration panel to specify what to do with the ad slot when they are unable 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 most on the first position of your ad chain and the others in a chain after it. The fill rate of an ad agency is depending on various factors such as their place in the ad chain since the “best” visitors are already taken by the ad agency in the first place.
Our four ad chains, which are 3 entries long, consist of the following ad agencies: ContextWeb, SayMedia, Lijit and Technorati Media.
We could also deliver ads from the following ad agencies, but they pay less or their fill rate is just too low: Burst Media, ValueClick, BannerConnect, Project Wonderful and Google AdSense.
In 2009, there were severe problems with obnoxious ads for teeth whitening products and other scams that appeared all over the internet. After the user backlash, most ad agencies now take greater care to only deliver ads for legit products and services. Nonetheless I still use the possibility to filter ads by category if the specific ad agency offers such an option in its administration panel.
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Well, do I hope you got my couple of cents now and then.
There’s really no reason not to use AdBlock because of all the garbage on the web out there, harmful or plain old annoying, but at the end of the day someone’s got to pay rent…
Have you considered Project Wonderful?
Chris M wrote:
It pays better than AdSense, but it should not come as a surprise that ad agencies with brand advertisers pay much better.
I recently installed an ad blocker, but I made sure to disable it for webcomic sites because those generally don’t have obnoxious or “Don’t let your local anthropologist(or whatever) fool you! Let US fool you!” ads. In fact, ads on webcomics are generally better-targetted for me and the ads here are no exception. I do happen to be in the market for a new prepaid cell phone, coincidentally enough. Although the one Woo is pointing at looks like a toy.
The good thing about Sandra and Woo website ads are that they are not pop ups or flashy animated ads. And it was placed on the right and left and below so it don’t bother my viewing much.
Meanwhile the jackass owner of Gawker think he can shove ads right in front of us, oh he will sure pay!
How much shall we donate, if we’re blocking the ads?
Wow, i tought you only have adsense only to make profits. thanks for some information that i could use on my websites.
PS: my google adsense got banned, do you have any idea to resolve this problems?
Disabled ABP and even configured my noscript.
Sadly can only get 1 ad to work all the time and a second to work sometimes without zealously allowing connections.
I’ll mess with it later. but I hope you continue to make good advertise choices for us all.
Thanks for putting this on, if you hadn’t I never would have thought to disable the add-blocker for this site to do my little part in funding you guys
This is not how adblocking works. The ads still count as being seen, and the site owners still get paid. Look it up. There are ad blockers that DO completely do this. They are stupid, download a good one like AdBlock Plus.
While I am not using an ad blocker, I’m also not seeing ads, so I should probably at least comment and explain why that is.
1. I’m using an RSS reader and rarely have a reason to actually visit the site, since the RSS has the comics inline and does not appear to contain ads. Some people really want their comics in-line, but I’d be generally happy to click through to the site and see the ads, except that
2. I don’t see any ads on the site normally because I am using noscript (which is not an adblocker; it’s an annoyance blocker). NoScript blocks any javascript or flash that might be running on a site that I do not specifically allow. I do that so that I don’t get popups or animations on the web when I’m not expecting them. It also means that ads, if they rely on javascript or flash, do not show up. I do generally see Project Wonderful ads and adsense, and afaik it would be quite possible for advertisers to make things work for me, even if they normally rely on flash or javascript. So in my mind noscript is the alternative to adblock for people who are OK with ads but don’t want annoyances; it just requires the ad system to do a little bit of work.
I realize that I am probably not typical even of the readers who are not seeing ads (at least as far as point 2 is concerned; it’s likely many people are using RSS; although one other commenter did mention noscript so maybe it’s more popular than I think), but I just thought I should comment so you hear about these things.
@ sonicboom:
Well cool! That’s the one I have… But you still can’t repeatedly click adds if you use one.
I do have AdBlockPlus installed but have explicitly disabled it on this page back then in 2010. However, I still don’t see the ads here, probably for the same reason as @ Vincent Povirk: I also have the NoScript plugin installed and don’t see any reason to allow advertisers to run code on my computer.
I wonder why the advertisers don’t generally put tag”>fallbacks in place that’d just display the ad e.g. as a hyperlinked image (which would work just fine without javascript). Maybe people who don’t want (or can’t) run JavaScript are a too small fraction of the market?
I’d love to not block the ads, thus supporting your fanastic comic. But this isn’t my internet (mine’s not worked for a year) it’s my college’s so I’m in no place to change it! Sorry!
For what it’s worth: I didn’t start using ad-blockers until advertisers started using annoying, invasive animation/rollover/popover/audio ads. At that point I simply lost patience and blocked the ad services which carried these — which was most of them.
I also block cross-site scripting, and indeed scripting in general, for security reasons unless there is a good reason to do otherwise. .
If you serve the ads as part of your own page, I’ll see them. If you embed them from elsewhere, I generally won’t.
My tools don’t let me easily relax the filters for a single web page. If I can figure out a reasonable way to make an exception for you I will, but otherwise… it’s the advertisers’ own fault for pissing in the soup.
I agree with RK and others above.
I don’t block ads (I found S&W by clicking on one), but I do block scripts, not only annoying but potentially malware delivering, and a lot of site that serve tracking cookies and web-beacons and the like.