A plug for FurAffinity

[kaysho]

If you use the Internet (and if you're reading this some other way, please let me know how), you know that all that free content comes with a curse: animated adverts.  Granted, your favourite websites have to pay the bills somehow, and a certain big company in Mountain View figured out a great way to do this fairly unobtrusively ... but other

Comments

[megadog]

Surely, ads are only of actual value to the advertiser [or the hosting site] if you click-through them?

Or is my understanding of web-proxying, NAT etc somehow broken?

[toob]

They're of value to the advertiser only if you actually buy something (or spread the word to someone who will).

But the hosting site gets paid based on views as well. It's a good idea not to ad-block on websites that provide content that's of value to you - you're harming what is in many cases their only revenue stream.

[megadog]

I guess if they work on pay-per-views as well as click-throughs then it would be of value. But from what I also remember, the usual ad-companies have 'countability issues' about getting multiple clicks/views from the same IP-address in a short time - which means that blocks of people on mobile phones or behind any other kind of proxy or NAT-device (so they appear to be coming from the same egress-address) don't get counted?

Or have the ad-revenue-counters got a lot better at dealing with this sort of thing in the decade or so since I had much to do with it? I know that a lot of my clients have big difficulties counting "unique hits" on their websites...

[toob]

Why Ad Blocking is Devastating to the Sites You Love

[kaysho]

True, but an aggregator like FA doesn't get the pleasure of sharing its own content, like an artist would ... and both artists and customers benefit from having a "one stop shop" that makes it easy to find each other, show off your art without having to do a lot of site maintenance past just uploading stuff, etc.

And the site is "free", in the sense that you don't need to pay to have your stuff hosted there or to browse. Except, of course, it's not free, because it costs money to run. So I'd say the adverts have real value.

[kaysho]

True, which is why I'll block the dancing chickens and the like. But adverts like the ones on FA (or Ars Technica, as Toob pointed out above) that have been screened and that don't contain active content like Flash, I have no concerns about. And if they're going to the trouble to screen, they're a good active site that probably will also make good use of the revenue to support the content.

[furahi]

I use ABP... but not Furaffinity, so I guess I'll pass :P

ABP doesn't necessarily block ads on FA specifically, the ads are probably served off some other site that serves ads to many sites (ie doubleclick.net).

I also mnage my ABP list manually usually (in fact I preferred the non plus AdBlock because it was the same as ABP except it didn't have the functionality to automatically download your list from the net, and the icon was 10 times better looking on my taskbar. Yes, 10 times, I measured it... with science)

[icywolfy]

FA Ads are all independantly run, and at very cheap rates. You just message Dragoneer directly, and get your ad into rotation. They are specific ads by the community, for the community. It's caught in the ad-block black list becase it's in a [div class="ads"] block. Which is a mass catch-all rule to catch people actually saying what the block contains. (They're hosted off ox.furaffinity.net)

[furahi]

Interesting, so they'd only need to rename their CSS style. I wonder if they specifically named it ads to be nice to people with ad blockers (or other ad tools...)

[kaysho]

I suspect it's more for the convenience of the site admins, considering that promoting blocking adverts on your own site is shooting yourself in the foot. :)

[aerofox]

Hmm, The ads on FurAffinity are mostly (if not all) furry related. I don't mind them a bit and often will click on one I find interesting or am curious about.

I'm glad there aren't mainstream commercial ads or power robbing/focus grabbing Flash ads!

Weather.com is one of the worst offenders and seem to make their website slow for broadband, let along trying to access it through dial-up...

[kaysho]

There are websites that I just won't access at all without an ad blocker in place, just because the load time of the site with all the adverts goes up so badly that the value of the information isn't worth it if you have to wait several minutes for it. They're really just shooting themselves in the foot in that case.

And yes, adverts on FA are all approved by the admins and aimed at the customer base, so you won't see anything non-furry there. Most of them (perhaps all) point to other pages on FA itself. It's rather self-defeating to block them.