I’m certainly not promoting an economy that depends on advertising but only suggesting that we are influenced positively and negatively by adverts to some degree.

There is no doubt that the best adverts are those that the consumer is pleased to see or hear and the publishers that achieve that kind of relevancy will succeed.

Interesting point about Sage. If you believe their ads are ‘annoying and intrusive and that they fundamentally don’t work’, why would they hurt my business?

However, I’m not entirely sold on this ‘advertising is a service to the consumer’ angle. That it’s helping me when I’m forced to look at ads, because otherwise I’d never find good new stuff. Putting aside the questions of freedom and choice, I do find new stuff all the time – through word of mouth and through serendipity. An economy that depended on advertising to learn about new things would be entirely in the hands of established players with the money to own the available keywords or banner slots. The money Sage throws at advertising is surely hurting your business, not helping it, David?

Also, I think this is also a bit of a storm in a teacup – the four million downloads – downloads, not users – of AdBlock are pretty trivial in the face of 1,173,109,925 internet users worldwide. And advertising spends online worldwide and especially in the West are not under threat by any means. They’re increasing very swiftly, particularly over the last 12 months. Any media owners whining about AdBlock should probably be looking elsewhere for the reasons their revenues aren’t soaring.

I think this is a really interesting debate and one I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about recently. As someone who runs a service on the ‘Freemium’ model which is to say that we take a combination of advertising revenue AND paid subscriptions, this is quite close to my heart.

Personally, I agree that it’s naive for publishers to hope that the new Web2.0 user generation will all avoid adblockers for the sake of retaining the breadth of free services they currently enjoy. I would never expect that.

However, when you say “Good stuff really gets my attention”, I think there might be a little commercial naivety in that statement. Marketers exist to help good stuff get found. If it was as simple as ‘build it VERY WELL and they will come’ then many a great invention would not have found us. It isn’t always just good enough to build a great product and watch what happens.

My point is that advertising revenue is often the bridge that keeps the publisher’s business growing until it can reach a point where alternative revenue sources become more realistic and sustainable.

I believe the Internet would be a much narrower, less interesting, less useful and less informative resource without the plethora of tools and resources that depend on adblocking not becoming universally adopted.

The beauty of it all is that it’s a free market. If adblocker becomes a huge hit and everybody installs it, then advertisers won’t pay up and many web services will run out of cash. Fewer web services will mean fewer resources for the end user which they ultimately won’t like and some clever sole will come up with an alternative.

Didn’t an advertising-funded publisher pay your salary for a while Ian? :-)

Romantic indeed :)

More venally, a small contribution to my paypal account every time I see an Ad on a page would be far more motivational :)

If you want to see a better future, look at thinks like Skype and Flickr. No ads. They keep their operating costs low by keeping their online service simple. They provide quality free services, attracting millions of users, to whom they sell a few value-added extras.