At PhoneNews.com, we respect people’s freedom to browse the web as they wish. In recent weeks, we’ve rolled out a mobile version of PhoneNews.com to improve that commitment. But, one of the many controversies on the internet in recent days (and weeks, and months) has been with readers that have chosen to deploy ad blocking software.
While many block things such as pop-up advertisements (all major web browsers now do this by default), other optional applications prevent any advertisement on the internet from being displayed. Some have taken retaliatory measures on their web sites, even going as far as to deny certain web browsers (such as Firefox) to ensure that viewers view ads.
Please understand, we need advertising. It is the only reliable source of revenue that pays for PhoneNews.com, and only starts to scratch the surface for the cost of the amount of time and effort that we put into it. We have had to increase our amount of advertising as a result of having a technically-savvy viewership… many of you have chosen to block ads. These same viewers are more likely to consume large amounts of resources (downloading large files and videos). This means others have to look at more ads.
Because PhoneNews.com has a more technically-savvy readership, we’re much more impacted by this problem than other sites. While we write to a very broad audience, having more advanced web users as readers has caused us to see a large disparity between the number of people that browse PhoneNews.com… and the number of people viewing advertisements. AdBlock, a popular Firefox add-on, is the primary culprit of this. Therefore, we ask you to stop using AdBlock and similar software.
In the end, blocking ads hurts the reader, it hurts the community, and it hurts PhoneNews.com. Television, radio, and print ventures get paid regardless of if you watch an advertisement… we don’t. If you are viewing PhoneNews.com frequently, we thank you for the continued support with your readership. Hopefully we will not have to become as aggressive as other web sites on this matter in the future.
