There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks
on ads, then blocking them won’t hurt a site financially. This is
wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a
per view basis.

I have no easy answer, but I will point out that there’s no inherent reason why ads have to be something people are tempted to block. It’s not enough to ask readers not to block ads — you’ve got to work hard at providing ads that readers actually enjoy, or at least aren’t tempted to block.

Update: There’s a prisoners’ dilemma problem with ad blockers, where it doesn’t matter if one site shows reasonable ads if others show crap ads, because those crap ads will drive users to install ad-blocking software, and ad-blocking software casts a wide net and blocks as much as it can. It’s unlikely that most ad-blocker-using Ars readers installed their ad-blocker because of the ads on Ars Technica.

Wi-Fi detection is something of a niche: there were never more
than a handful of such applications in iTunes. But now even those
have vanished as Apple decided they were using a “private
framework”, and has pulled them off the shelves without
explanation or apology. […]

“We received a very unfortunate email today from Apple stating
that WiFi Where has been removed from sale on the App Store for
using private frameworks to access wireless information,” explains
one developer, though Apple has apparently declined to explain
exactly what rule the scanning applications are breaking.

Uh, the rule against using private frameworks?

Update: Worth noting that this is the same Bill Ray who, in December 2006, a month before the iPhone was unveiled, wrote “Why the Apple Phone Will Fail, and Fail Badly”.

Perhaps more important, the PDK will allow developers to rewrite
mobile apps created for other platforms to run on webOS with
minimal modification. Apps that currently run on Apple’s
iPhone, for example, can be ported over in a matter of days,
sources close to the company tell me, and they don’t really
suffer any degradation in performance.

I can only assume that this is in reference to games with cross-platform cores, not utility-type apps that are Cocoa Touch through-and-through.

(The Mac Sale is a collaboration between MacZot and The Escapers, makers of the Flux web design app.)

Snell writes:

RSS doesn’t generate revenue directly. There are ads in RSS,
sure, but they’re cheap and lousy and don’t have remotely the
return as ads on web pages. The question is, if you publish all
your content in RSS, does the resulting drop in traffic get offset
by the fringe benefits? In the mind of some — presumably
including Merlin Mann and John Gruber — you may lose a small
percentage of tech-savvy people, but those people tend to be the
ones who pass links around to friends and on their blogs and on
Twitter, and a lot of those people will come to your web site from
there, so in the end it’s a net benefit. Plus, more people will
care about you and your brand and that’s a good thing.

I agree, that’s good. I wish someone could cite some studies
that prove that giving away your full-text RSS doesn’t hurt
traffic, but helps it.

It should go without saying that what works for me here at Daring Fireball, as a one-man show, may well not work (or work nearly as well) for a large operation with a full editorial staff such as Macworld. But: DF’s RSS feed, which contains the full content of the site, not only generates money directly, but has grown to become the single largest source of revenue on the site.

The ads in most sponsored RSS feeds are indeed cheap and lousy. The ads in DF’s RSS feed are neither. They’re priced at a premium, and have attracted (if I do say so myself) premium sponsors.

What is “traffic”? I suspect Snell is talking about page views. When someone loads a web page in their browser, that’s a page view. Most advertising on the web (but not all) is sold using page views as the metric — advertisers pay an agreed-upon amount for every thousand page views on which their ad appears.

When I switched DF’s free public RSS feed to full-content in August 2007, DF’s web page views had been growing steadily month-to-month. After the switch, web page views were stagnant, with no growth, for about a year. (If anything, they went down in the first few months.) But readership clearly continued to grow: subscribers to the feed skyrocketed. And, about a year ago, even web page views started growing significantly once again — going from a little over one million per month to a little over two million per month.

If you’ve got a model where revenue is tied only to web page views, switching to full-content RSS feeds will hurt, at least in the short term. The problem, I say, isn’t with full-content RSS feeds, but rather with a business model that hinges solely on web page views. The precious commodity that we, as publishers, have to offer advertisers is the attention of our readers. Web page views are a terribly inaccurate, if not outright misleading, metric for attention. Subscribers to a full-content RSS feed are among the readers paying the most attention, but generate among the least web page views.

A reader asking for a full-content RSS feed is a reader who wants to pay more attention to what you publish. There have to be ways to thrive financially from that.

(I could go on, which is good, because my friend Jim Coudal and I are speaking together on this very topic — online advertising — at SXSW next week. Our session is at 3:30pm Sunday afternoon.)

Update: Jason Snell’s thoughtful response.