https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/11-team-gamefaqs/66194632
"Ad Blocking, Memberships, and You:
Its no secret that ad blocking is a bit of a contentious topic on the Internet. This isnt a new issue. Since the first banner ads went up, people have been trying to block them. There have been a hundred different arguments about the morality of ad blocking, whether or not advertising supported content is a bad business model, and whether or not ad blockers mean an end to the free Internet, but thats for another time and place.
Weve read other articles online from other sites talking about how many people blocked ads on their pages, so we wanted to find out just how much blocking was happening on GameFAQs. A few weeks ago, we ran a 24-hour test to find out just how many people blocked ads, and followed it up with a survey sent out to people who were blocking ads to find out some more about them.
The results? Slightly more than a quarter (26%) of all visitors to GameFAQs are blocking ads, and that number goes up to 40% when we count only registered users. Thats lower than some of the numbers weve seen reported online from other sites, but in line with what we expected on both counts. We found out some really interesting things about ad blocking, like how mainland Europe (especially Germany) blocks ads a lot more than North America, and that theres very little blocking going on in Asia by comparison. The longer someone has been using GameFAQs, the better the chances theyve blocked ads, but the good news (for us) is that ad blocking hasnt taken root on tablets or mobile devices (yet).
We sent out a random survey to registered users who we spotted blocking ads with some interesting (and some loaded) questions, with the main purpose of finding out why they were blocking ads and what they thought we should do about it. The top reason by far was that many ads are just too distracting, often flashing, moving, and shaking to draw the users eye away the content they want to read. 70% of people responding listed it as a reason they block ads. On a text-heavy site like GameFAQs, the problem is even worse. When the only graphic on a page is an advertisement, it can be hard to keep focus.
Half of respondents just plain didnt like advertising in general, or were tired of them slowing down and/or crashing their browsers. Over 40% had privacy and security concerns, along with just being overloaded with so many ads per page.
If we asked really nicely (and maybe made people feel really guilty about it) up to 75% of respondents said theyd be willing to turn off ad blocking on GameFAQs, but most of them only under the condition that we got rid of the flashier ads. Therein lies the problem. Its the flashier ads that get the most clicks, and so theyre the ones that earn us the most money by a huge margin. Honestly, wed love to roll back to the days of text and static image ads, but doing so would be crippling ourselves financially. Its a no-win situation, and its not just our problem, but one the online advertising industry is going to be facing for a very long time.
The main alternative among sites like ours to being ad-supported is selling subscriptions, offering premium memberships that remove advertisements and provide additional content and privileges. The problem for GameFAQs is that our content is 100% user-generated and its not ours to sell. Providing additional privileges costs us time and money to build and maintain. It also creates a system of haves and have-nots, which leads to its own set of problems. Only 1% of people responding to our survey would be willing to subscribe to an ad-free GameFAQs membership outright, and that number doesnt go too much higher even if we offered some kind of additional benefits (which were having a hard time even coming up with anyway).
What about funding the site through donations, like Wikipedia? Lets face it, were owned by a multinational media company, and asking for our users to fund us while our parent corporation reports a profitable quarter probably wouldnt sit too well with many people. As much as we like to think of ourselves as a public service for gamers helping gamers, were still a business, and have to operate like one.
So, what do we do now? Well, were not really between a rock and a hard place yet. As many people as there are blocking ads, there are more that arent, and thats more than enough to keep us going for the foreseeable future. Its something were keeping an eye on, but we can live with it for now. We dont have anything to offer in the way of a premium service, but we might just look into partnering up with one of our sister sites to offer an ad-free GameFAQs as a bonus, or even just giving our best and top contributing users the ability to shut ads off.
At the end of the day, were definitely coming out ahead and will be for a long time to come, so dont think that were having some kind of financial crisis. Rather, we are simply doing some research and thought wed share the results with everyone. We hope that everyone reading this finds it to be interesting. On a closing note, we would definitely love for you to whitelist GameFAQs on your ad blockers, but its okay if you dont. We understand."
Amazing how reasonable that post is, and how different it is from "the current administration's approach".
WHO AM I?FFTHEWINNER. WHO ARE YOU?URTHELOSER
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