1/I don't even understand why people complain about ad blocking. It's part of the equation. Some people don't read the ads, some block it. It's nowhere near stealing.
It's like offering a "pay as you like" service and complain that people don't pay or not enough. Well, if you have a precise idea of how much you should charge then change the price tag my friend. Stop the hypocrisy.
2/A service will be more successful if it's "free". If you cannot manage to charge money for your service, it means the perceived value is not that much and you don't have a working business model.
Stop complaining. Rethink your business model. Adapt.
3/A site with advertisement is not free. In exchange of reading content I deem useful, I will read content that might lead to a business transaction in the future.
4/I might be willing to pay a small yearly fee for an ad-free service like Stackoverflow. The deal could be "if you pay a certain amount of money, you don't get ads".
5/AFAIK the content of Stackoverflow is written by people who don't get paid. It's a community web site. People feel that they own a part of the content and therefore shouldn't suffer advertisement (which is why, I guess, you get less aggressive advertisement as your reputation go up, unless I'm mistaken I have more than 3,000 reputation and don't see any advertisement).
6/People mentally block ads on web sites. There was a link about this on HN a while ago, can't find it though.
Why is the mental friction of a micropayment so much worse than having to ignore (or block) ads? It's all in our heads. I think people fear micro-payments because it's something they don't know and because there is no cap. A rectangle on their web pages with obnoxious stuff they didn't want -- this they understand, so they live with it or block it.
Unfortunately, this results in the ad market being able to deliver the sub-population of users too lazy or not savvy enough to block ads, and this is not the most lucrative subset!
Micropayments as Ads are very indirect and fraught with problems and ambiguities. I wish irrational emotional factors weren't blocking a well needed Refactoring!
Because micropayment requires me to do at least 10 actions with the hidden thought "is this secure?" whereas blocking ads is more around like three actions.
More important, when I pull out my credit card, this is exactly the same action than when I buy for 300 € worth of stuff on a web site.
It's like offering a "pay as you like" service and complain that people don't pay or not enough. Well, if you have a precise idea of how much you should charge then change the price tag my friend. Stop the hypocrisy.
2/A service will be more successful if it's "free". If you cannot manage to charge money for your service, it means the perceived value is not that much and you don't have a working business model.
Stop complaining. Rethink your business model. Adapt.
3/A site with advertisement is not free. In exchange of reading content I deem useful, I will read content that might lead to a business transaction in the future.
4/I might be willing to pay a small yearly fee for an ad-free service like Stackoverflow. The deal could be "if you pay a certain amount of money, you don't get ads".
5/AFAIK the content of Stackoverflow is written by people who don't get paid. It's a community web site. People feel that they own a part of the content and therefore shouldn't suffer advertisement (which is why, I guess, you get less aggressive advertisement as your reputation go up, unless I'm mistaken I have more than 3,000 reputation and don't see any advertisement).
6/People mentally block ads on web sites. There was a link about this on HN a while ago, can't find it though.