Advertisement Myths Explained
Ads use up bandwidth that I pay for: Advertisements use up a small amount of bandwidth each time they are displayed. How small? When you scroll down the wall of a social media page, like Twitter or Facebook, you will see videos automatically start playing. That video that you’ve just watched for around 5 seconds before you scrolled past it has used by thousands—yes, thousands—of times more bandwidth than a banner ad would that sits on your computers display all day. Roughly that much bandwidth. Not much. Far less than for it to be something anybody with common sense would complain about. Bandwidth from ads is not a problem that should concern anyone but the homeless.
Ads may have viruses in them: The risk of getting a virus from an advertisement that is shown on ConsumingTech.com is 0.000000%. You will never get a virus from an ad on our site. ConsumingTech, like the vast majority of other legitimate publications, only runs ads coming from trusted sources that have the world’s best virus protection managing and maintaining the advertisements so that nothing along the lines of a virus or a virus can exist within an advertisement. Ads aren’t typically served directly from purchaser to then being displayed to readers. There are million dollar and billion dollar advertisement agencies looking after them—such as Google, for example. All ads you see on ConsumingTech, are, in fact, delivered by Google, in the sense that Google is our agency who manages what ads are shown on our website. Google takes 40% cut for managing the ads, and the other 60% goes directly into our pockets.
Webmaster Thwarting
Oh you can’t stand looking at banner advertisements? Well f___ off then…
Some webmasters don’t allow their visitors to view content unless they remove their ad blockers, and most of those same people wouldn’t want you viewing their content anyway if banner ads were that annoying to you. We don’t do that—not because we don’t necessarily want to but because it wouldn’t work that well. Even if you whitelisted our site, you’ll reset/refresh your PCs operating system or buy another computer every so often, and the problem starts all over again where we are no longer whitelisted. The only way it would be somewhat of any use if we kept it running all the time, but we don’t have plans to make that happen because it’s a big commitment.
It would be of use to us to ask our subscribers who routinely visit us and read more content, and we force people to whitelist our site when subscribers grab daily freebies instead—having our subscribers whitelist us is important, and we thank you for your cooperation.
Today’s issue of having people choose to block ads in a deliberate attempt to take away many website’s only sources in revenue is morally wrong. The internet cannot survive without ad revenue. Hundreds of thousands or independent publications would die off because there’s no way they could sustain enough money coming through from subscriptions. Subscriptions work well for some niches, and they don’t work well for others. There’s no way around that other than to not block the ads on websites who advertise responsibly.
The urge to block ads usually comes from visiting sites involved in illegal or adult content. Those sites don’t get the luxury of being able to use the ad networks that pay out well which results in them putting ads in deceitful places or an abundance around the webpages that you visit from those domains. Rarely will you come across a site in the tech niche that is getting a lot of traffic and is a reputable website with advertisements that are deceitful or overbearing in any way shape or form—like ours, that displays simple banners above, below and around the content, for example.
Are Banners Really That Bad?
Even if we could make enough money to remove the banner ads, we wouldn’t necessarily do it. When running ad blocks, our site is very dull. The banners provide some graphical content for the reader, including us when we have to sift through our own stuff to proofread, edit and update.
TV advertisements are annoying because they force you to sit through them and you lose time out of your life. You don’t have that same consequence with banner ads. We’d take our free TV with banner ads being shown on the sides any day of the week over having to sit through two minutes of ads every 8 minutes that go by during a show. Flash banners are annoying; normal banners are not. We don’t display flash banners, so you don’t have anything to worry about. It’s just generally a picture of something sitting in the sidebar—not nearly as big of a deal as many people make them out to be.
Ads Work
Advertisements work. You’ll hear a lot of complaining online about how much people hate ads, but that’s mainly because a large portion of the onlookers choose to remain quiet unless they have something negative to say.
The online world has one of the soundest businesses modules out of anywhere: the content creators get paid just by showing ads, businesses get to grow by choosing to advertise, consumers get free stuff by viewing the content along with the ads.
Many people are interested in advertisements—we know this because we have the statistics. They aren’t clicking on them because we’ve deceived them; they are clicking on things that they like, and the occasional days when something interesting is being displayed on a banner, only confirms this further because our statics match up with those days having a considerably higher percentage of clicks than the others.
We thank you for your support as we try to keep this thing running for, at least, a little while longer.