LogFAQs > #979940030

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I'm the same. But we're both still adding to their numbers.

When they go to advertisers and say "We have X unique user hits per day" or "We have X amount of activity on the site", that helps determine how much they charge for ads. Blocking ads will translate to how many click-throughs or views any given ad gets (which also affects ad costs), but simply by posting here at all and generating activity we're still contributing to their ability to make money.

If you really want to hurt them, not coming here at all hurts worse than being an active user who just uses adblock. Because you're both no longer directly contributing to site activity statistics, but the more people leave, the more it encourages other people to potentially leave because they no longer have anyone else to interact with.

I'm not 100% certain of the mechanics, but I'm fairly sure advertisers have the ability to differentiate between a page view and an ad view. One of the main reasons anti-adblock measures are a bad idea (aside from the fact that they piss people off) is because they decimate click-through rate, given that people currently blocking ads are overwhelmingly not going to click on them if they're forced to view them, but that would only be the case if page views were counted differently from ad views. Fandom can still use their total viewer numbers to attract advertisers, who will expect that the proportion of ad views to page views will be roughly consistent with other sites (I wouldn't be surprised if it's worse, given how egregious GameFAQs ads are, but that's also true of every Fandom site because they're trash) and can extrapolate from there, but my activity still isn't going to be valuable.

I'm half curious what would happen to their statistics if people left refresh bots (by which I mean a mouse macro that hit F5 every five seconds, which is perhaps stretching the definition of "bot") running. They wouldn't count as unique hits, obviously, and on a large enough scale it could translate into a DoS situation, but if they're counted as page views then blocking ads on those views would likely skew the stats.