gentoo.LinuxHowtos.orgMay, 25th 2007
This is a short essay about why the use of adblockers is bad for the viewer (user of the adblocker).

A huge amount (not exact numbers are known to me) of those sites are made by individials or a group of individuals in their spare time.
They spend great amounts of time for the content which they offer to be read by you for free.
Most of them have one thing in common: they get no money for writing and you pay no money for reading.
Some content creators publish just for the fun of it, some to become famous, some to help a.s.o.

"So what?" or "What does it have to do with me and my adblocker?" you might think.
The sites cost money for hosting, domain name and service. Usually not much, but a few $ per month can sum up.
For a lot of sites, advertising is the only income for those sites.
By using an adblocker, you take away their only income.
If you own a shop and every visitor goes to the magazine rack and reads the news for free and nobody buys anything, how long would YOU keep the rack?
Do you get the point?

If the sites get no income to keep up the costs of the sites, they will disapear or get no maintainance any more and will die slowly.
So you have no new stuff to read, interesting things to learn except those sites made by a few big publishers.
Would the internet still be that interesting?

By the way, reading this did cost ME money, did the ad on the site show up? no?
Would it be such a pain to have an ad on the site, no not one of those nasty layer ads or pop ups, just a normal text or image block without flicker, audio or flash crap?
Sure, you are always free to donate some money, but lets face it, nobody wants to do that.
Almost everybody wants to have stuff for free, no payments or concessions.
Disabling the adblocker would be a small step to keep the internet and its millions of small and interesting pages alive. It would be a tiny sacrifice but would make a difference.

Just out of curiosity and the technical possibilites, I checked and found out, that 40% of my visitor use an adblocker.
You never know, maybe there was something really interesting you might have missed.
So please give it a try and disable the adblocker for your own interest. Keep the popup blocker active if it annoys you, but please give the site owner a chance to get a little money back.

Sometimes just displaying the ads is helping, not all banners get paid per click, some of them get paid by view.

If you like a site (like this, hint hint) make an exception rule for the adblocker to allow it to show its banners, please.
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