Except sites like Forbes which don't let you browse the site until you stop blocking their ads. They throw up a full-window mask that obscures the content and disables scrolling.
This is always a touchy subject I find. Especially since I'm usually on the receiving end of trying to figure out an optimal solution.
My site is run on a dedicated server. This roughly costs me around €250 per month. We provide a huge amount of services (full card database, card tooltips for developers, full API, article writers who need to be paid and more) which made this a necessity. On top of that Cloudflare, Google Cloud Storage and a few other things add about €120ish to that per month for a total of around €370 which is rather expensive.
We absolutely need ads on the site to keep the site afloat. I have heavily looked into alternative forms of revenue (dontations, patreon, etc) but none of them are quite good enough to keep the site up. I have tried my absolute hardest to not make the ads on the site annoying or intrusive (more on that with my next point). I have a very small message on the homepage if ad-blocker is detected.
At the start of 2019, I entered an advertising partnership with Fanbyte. They have taken over the ads on the site and they are in charge of the ads (but I still have the final say at the end of the day if I choose to).
We agreed on some ads and I disagreed and denied others (video that scrolls with you in the sidebar I said "no" to).
Now the hard part. I remember sharing an article from the site once and all USA based users were being ad-redirected to these malware giveaway sites. Needless to say, I was super pissed and not happy. Obviously this is not what I intended or wanted. I shot an email to the ad team and they had the redirects blacklisted and the advertiser blacklisted and fully apologized to me. I'm still a little annoyed at the situation but these things do happen and often happen unintentionally. They even happened when I was alone with Google ads and I had to report them to Google.
I'm not entirely sure what my point is (a lot of rambling) except that these things are a constant headache and sometimes very hard to directly control.
Less people clicking means less opportunities to share making things worse.
Look, I get it you need ad revenue to support your website. I can wholeheartedly empathize with that. You put up a little plea "please we need to be able to run ads" and I think "alright, I visit this game site quite often the least I can do is let you run ads".
Then you attack me for giving you the benefit of the doubt, well over 1/2 the page content (top to bottom) becomes ads (in the image I posted that is not an exaggeration), you make an autoplay video follow me down the screen, you pull up a bar on the right side of the screen whose entire purpose is to host ads that show up no matter what part of the page I'm on, you animate these ads, you make me scroll through 37 (yes I counted) ads to see the comments, this kills my browser performance when I'm checking out your site on a lower end machine. This makes me completely deaf to your plight.
Rant over
Or websites and ad networks could regulate their shit better so that people don't feel the need to block them.
Lol stealing. Also they still get clicks which helps promote their article further in rankings wether in Google search or anywhere so they still benefit from clicks and engagement and some shares from adblock users
Look, I get it you need ad revenue to support your website. I can wholeheartedly empathize with that. You put up a little plea "please we need to be able to run ads" and I think "alright, I visit this game site quite often the least I can do is let you run ads".
Then you attack me for giving you the benefit of the doubt, well over 1/2 the page content (top to bottom) becomes ads (in the image I posted that is not an exaggeration), you make an autoplay video follow me down the screen, you pull up a bar on the right side of the screen whose entire purpose is to host ads that show up no matter what part of the page I'm on, you animate these ads, you make me scroll through 37 (yes I counted) ads to see the comments, this kills my browser performance when I'm checking out your site on a lower end machine. This makes me completely deaf to your plight.
Rant over
Yup. Twitch is browsable now and it keeps me from even going to the app.
It could potentially be interpreted as some variation of kinda-sorta-maybe stealing, but it's neither plain nor simple.
I'm using Mozilla with Adblock+, Ublock Origin, Adguard Adblocker. I don't have any ad using Twitch, it's just a little slower. I was in the situation you described, it was really insufferable. If we could skip it after 3 or 5 seconds like many other sites, I would have endured. But too much is too much, fuck Twitch.
