Ad Revenue Is Something You Earn
Yes! I want to quote this a million times over.
Revenue from Adsense and its ilk is a reward for writing content that made people want to visit your website and grant you a pageview. If you do it really well, you’ll get a bunch of pageviews, and a bunch of money. Employing tricks like needless pagination, auto-refreshing (see Salon.com), misleading headlines, and the like is cheating. You didn’t earn those pageviews, you tricked people into giving them to you. And then you look at shit like popups, popunders, double underlined links, Snap previews, Tynt scripts, and so on, and it’s pretty clear how hostile it all is. It’s nothing but money-grabbing. If you’ve got it set up so bad that your readers are employing things like ad blockers and Safari’s Reader, you fucked up. You did something wrong. You overestimated how much your readers are willing to tolerate. We all realise you rely on advertising revenue, but it’s not something you’re entitled to, it’s something you earn by cultivating a user base, and any revenue lost to ad blockers and Safari’s Reader is money you failed to earn this week, because you pissed off all your readers.
