Update (2005/05/23): Some more evidence of the ad-filtering conflict reaching the surface.
By nature, ads tend to have a negative value to the user at that instant, whereas the content it pays for has positive value. I think the key for advertisers is how to make sure ads are a service (useful) rather than a disservice (annoying attempts to catch the user's attention). This way users have an incentive to leave the ads on. Trying to force the user is only going to alienate them more.
But even if ads were perfect, users only have so much money and attention. Given that I very rarely buy something from an ad, I feel saturated by them already. The question is how close is the rest of internauts to their saturation point?
Newsforge has a thread about whether AdBlock violates a social contract, picked up by Slashdot. I don't think there is any social contract (which imply a bilateral agreement, albeit informal) here. Adding ads is mostly a unilateral move from publishers, trying to maximize profit by probing how many and how annoying ads users will tolerate. It's the same thing that happened with ads posted on buses, highways, subways, magazines ... Some ads don't even benefit in any way to the user, like billboard ads. Whereas in magazines, they at least make the price go down. xxx
AdBlock is a comparable unilateral move but from the users this time. If I could filter ads in the real world (AdBlock glasses), I probably would. xxx
It seems like a more efficient feedback loop would help finding a balance, rather than have the system jerk and drift because of un-coordinated decisions of some of the actors.
For example, sites could make their "implicit contract" more transparent, and I don't mean visiting a website should turn into a legal agreement signing ritual ;-). Sites could also look for ways to allow users to express their preferences and tolerance. Browsers could cooperate by letting websites know when ads are being filtered (for measuring purposes, not blocking).
Much of the information about the advertisement equation is not known to all parties involved: what are the costs and gains to the user and to the website? The micropayments revenue model could help, because it makes these elements of the transaction explicit. Of course, that is also a problem because asking the user to evaluate each page view as such a transaction is a massive waste of cognitive energy.
Maybe the new models will make us regret the good old ads ;-)
Links:
"Boing Boing, Ka-Ching Ka-Ching" is a rant about the lack of transparency in advertising and how Boing Boing's intended "experiment with ads" seems to have turned into an obsessive milking of the cash cow.
BoingBoing Butler xxx
Last month I posted about the brewing war of ad filtering xxx
xxx
Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content
http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html