Yeah, that’s true. But…if a website derives its revenue from ads, a non-ad-viewing user — and users who switch browsers so as to use an ad blocker would presumably be blocking ads — loses that website money rather than generating it. Like, for such a website, the issue would be how many Firefox users that do view ads would be lost if their website didnlt work on Firefox.
Those of you who remember the early 2000s, when Internet Explorer had very high marketshare, probably remember a number of websites that didn’t work with other browsers.
If your website needs ad revenue to either exist, or that’s fundamentally its entire business model?
That website does not need to exist.
Now sure, are their caveats to this? Yes. But broadly, its usually true. The website should exist as a small loss leading part of your whole shebang, or should have some kind of membership or donation model or something else, to fund itself.
Its also not that hard to make a website follow broswer agnostic standards. If the website can’t figure out how to do that, if they think its fine to be a browser-vendor exclusive website, I don’t need to use it.
Google is already killing the ad revenue model of the web by presenting the content it scrapes with AI for search — effectively stealing their content for profit — instead of ranking links so users navigate to their sites. Many have ahead seen a 70-90% drop in traffic, resulting in a 70-90% drop in ad revenue.
Capitalism is a blast, huh? Crime is very legal and very cool!
Yeah, that’s true. But…if a website derives its revenue from ads, a non-ad-viewing user — and users who switch browsers so as to use an ad blocker would presumably be blocking ads — loses that website money rather than generating it. Like, for such a website, the issue would be how many Firefox users that do view ads would be lost if their website didnlt work on Firefox.
Those of you who remember the early 2000s, when Internet Explorer had very high marketshare, probably remember a number of websites that didn’t work with other browsers.
Broad rule of thumb for me:
If your website needs ad revenue to either exist, or that’s fundamentally its entire business model?
That website does not need to exist.
Now sure, are their caveats to this? Yes. But broadly, its usually true. The website should exist as a small loss leading part of your whole shebang, or should have some kind of membership or donation model or something else, to fund itself.
Its also not that hard to make a website follow broswer agnostic standards. If the website can’t figure out how to do that, if they think its fine to be a browser-vendor exclusive website, I don’t need to use it.
Google is already killing the ad revenue model of the web by presenting the content it scrapes with AI for search — effectively stealing their content for profit — instead of ranking links so users navigate to their sites. Many have ahead seen a 70-90% drop in traffic, resulting in a 70-90% drop in ad revenue.
Capitalism is a blast, huh? Crime is very legal and very cool!