diamond geezer

Friday, February 26, 2016

We notice that you're using an ad-blocker.

How very dare you?

Please consider supporting this website by disabling your ad-blocker.

Leave all the other sites blocked, because they're virulent flashing sideshows of irrelevance, but we're really nice. We only cram a few adverts into the sidebar, and the odd impossible-to-avoid graphic panel halfway down the article you're trying to read. Go on, de-list us and allow us to squeeze some micropayments from our sponsors. It's the least we deserve.

We understand how annoying certain adverts can be. You're trying to read 150 words we've written and there are our ads dancing on your screen, embedding cookies in your browser, and delaying your gratification. Mobile advertising is a particular killer, with over-flashy ads hijacking too much data, slowing down your device and preventing you from reading what you've clicked through to see. But have patience, the actual content will load eventually, once we've mined all the data we can possibly grab.

Your petty disruptive behaviour is threatening to destroy the key relationship between advertisers and consumers. You thought the internet existed to entertain and inform but no, it exists essentially for other people to make a living. By blocking the ads that make the content worthwhile, you risk killing off the medium that fills your every waking hour. And then how bored would you be?

It's damned selfish of you, to be honest.

What you need to realise is that there are good ads and there are bad ads, and ad-blockers can't tell the difference. Some ads are so good that we think you really would like to see them, and if you block everything you completely destroy the value exchange and ecosystem that digital commerce brings. Unless you permit us to reveal the truth, how will you know if ours are good ads, bad ads, or those horrific freeze-your-browser ads you so detest? Take a risk, and let us show you.

Rest assured that this website does not use audio ads, popups, or other annoyances. Occasionally a video will start up unaided and blare across the office, and sometimes a flashing rectangle will chase you round the screen, but trust us, that's by no means the worst we could do.

We do of course recognise that ad-blocking improves the performance of your computer, but please try to ignore this. Instead, we beg of you, please whitelist our site and allow us to profit from your naivety. There's a setting on a submenu of that app in that browser you use, and all you have to do is enter our address in one of the lists or other, and then we can continue that special relationship we used to have. Somebody at our end writes something, we dump a lottery ad alongside it, you look at both, and hey presto our writers get paid.

We can't go on day after day providing quality journalism if you're not going to play the game.

All this content we generate doesn't just conjure itself up from nowhere, you know, it takes time and effort. And our time and effort deserve your total attention, via a selection of brightly coloured rectangles scattered across everything you'd like to be reading. The more rectangles the better, from our point of view, be they for holidays, Sky TV, diet pills or malware. We prefer to deliver you richly personalised advertising material, assuming you've been stupid enough to stick to the default privacy settings, but quite frankly anything will do so long as we get a few fractions of a penny as a result.

One banner ad for a West End show can feed a programmer for a week, because wages are low on the Indian subcontinent. One fifteen second pre-roll advert can pay our journalists for almost a complete sentence, whether you end up reloading the page in frustration or not. And one complete halo of virulent javascript you can't avoid tapping however hard you try can bring in almost tuppence, from the right provider.

You need to get away from the idea that the internet is somehow free. Our bit isn't, and quite frankly your freeloading presence on our site disgusts us. Things were so much better before you installed that extra bit of software, before you got wise to the idea that the internet didn't have to be choked with distracting irrelevance. We coped well enough while only a few people thought this way, but now the trickle of ad-blocking is becoming a torrent, and we stand to lose our livelihoods as a result.

Make no mistake, the rise of ad-blocking software is a curse upon the entire creative economy, and if left unchecked will cause the premature death of many a struggling online enterprise.

If we cannot support this site on advertising revenue, we will have to introduce a paywall, meaning fewer readers will have access to our incisive analysis, comprehensive coverage and amusing lists of stolen tweets.

Obviously this frightens us more than you, because you can find amusing lists of stolen tweets for free all over the internet, and there's no way you're going to pay for ours. This whole online paywall thing only works if everybody does it, as various newspapers have found to their cost when they slip behind the veil and too few follow. Suddenly nobody shares the paper's content any more, nobody likes their articles, indeed they might as well not have bothered publishing anything for all the attention they get.

So please cease your ad-blocking assault, the sooner the better, for the sake of all of us here at Diamond Geezer.

Because there's absolutely no way a quality website can function without advertising, it simply isn't possible, and the sooner we all come to terms with this reality the better.