However, due to the amount of news sources (more competition, not just for you, but also for my dollar/euro), lower production costs and scale advantages, I don’t think I would spend offline magazine prices online. A fair price would sound like $2.50/m with discounts when a yearly subscription is bought. I hope that’ll be around the amount of ad revenue you get per regular visitor.

Thanks for the info. We’ve been thinking about doing something like that, and for the people who’d pay the $2.50 it would probably work out better in our favor since those would probably be the ones who would ordinarily block the ads all together. We have been thinking about whether or not to pursue the site full-time though, and so we’d hate to charge someone when in the next few months we may not be writing as frequently as we are now. I appreciate the response though, and gives us something else to think about.

We’ve thought about doing that, but I don’t know how many people would actually go for it. What’s a reasonable price that you’d pay out of curiosity?

Heh, good question. And a difficult one. It does depend on how important the news of a site is to me, how high the quality is, if I would get more (news/features/other) than non-paying visitors, and how easy it is to get the news elsewhere.

If I take Cybernetnews as an example, I would say the site is pretty important to me, has good quality content (bordering high quality), and it’s not very easy to get the same quality, amount and type of news delivered by other sources. That would get the price to a regular magazine price.

However, due to the amount of news sources (more competition, not just for you, but also for my dollar/euro), lower production costs and scale advantages, I don’t think I would spend offline magazine prices online. A fair price would sound like $2.50/m with discounts when a yearly subscription is bought. I hope that’ll be around the amount of ad revenue you get per regular visitor..

(Looked up after I wrote the comment above: the site I was talking about has subscriptions from €1.25 – for an ad-free site – to €2.50 per month, where you get more features than free users are getting.)

I would gladly pay for some sites I visit to get an ad-free version (if the price is reasonable), but most don’t offer that option unfortunately. I think only one site I visit regularly offers this.

We’ve thought about doing that, but I don’t know how many people would actually go for it. What’s a reasonable price that you’d pay out of curiosity?

Well, Adsense uses JavaScript and so does our Google Analytics. So the crawlers/bots would need to have JavaScript in order to register on both Adsense and Google Analytics. So I’m fairly certain that the numbers for both are for real people.

Judging by our traffic we always have about 30% fewer impressions on ads than we pageviews on the site. That’s likely because a large portion of our readership are tech-savvy users who are blocking the ads.

Or because those aren’t users. On my site, around 30% of impressions is caused by “users” who don’t download any images, scripts or CSS at all. That’s various spiders (including the ones that ignore robots.txt and use a User-Agent header of a browser), spam bots, vulnerability scanners and the like. You shouldn’t expect them to view your ads…

@StationStops.com: I disagree. There was a short period where using a popup blocker allowed you to browse the web comfortably. By now advertisers caught up however and try to get your attention by using animations and layer ads. On many sites you have trouble finding the content and once you found it you really cannot concentrate on reading it (studies have been made and confirm that animations are extremely distracting even though people learned to ignore ads automatically). Now we are at the same stage again where we were before the popup blockers.

Exactly! I’m using AdMuncher (with whitelists), but I refuse to voluntarily browse sites which show animated ads or worse: layer ads or ads with video/sound. I would gladly pay for some sites I visit to get an ad-free version (if the price is reasonable), but most don’t offer that option unfortunately. I think only one site I visit regularly offers this.

I have no problem with text-ads by the way. I leave all Google ads enabled for that reason.

I thought changing AdBlock to “Hide Ads” instead of “Remove Ads” still gives websites credit for advertising without me seeing the ad. Is this not correct?

Possibly… I’ve never used the extension so I’m not sure what it’s using to hide the ads. From the sounds of it you should be correct about how that works.

That’s definitely true. Judging by our traffic we always have about 30% fewer impressions on ads than we pageviews on the site. That’s likely because a large portion of our readership are tech-savvy users who are blocking the ads.

Does this count include people using AdBlock *and* AdBlock Plus? Personally I have never used the “Plus” extension.

@StationStops.com: I disagree. There was a short period where using a popup blocker allowed you to browse the web comfortably. By now advertisers caught up however and try to get your attention by using animations and layer ads. On many sites you have trouble finding the content and once you found it you really cannot concentrate on reading it (studies have been made and confirm that animations are extremely distracting even though people learned to ignore ads automatically). Now we are at the same stage again where we were before the popup blockers.

@Transcontinental: Don’t think so. The usage numbers for Ad Muncher should be way below Adblock Plus. What could be more common is firewall and antivirus software with ad blocking functionality – very often people aren’t even aware that they are blocking ads (Outpost Firewall is a typical example). In the end, the vast majority of Firefox users is still viewing the ads (this might not hold true for the more technically advanced audience).