Yesterday’s short article on electronic wallpaper has been visited quite a lot by the readers of Slashdot. Slashdot is an online forum/magazine and is one of the busiest websites in the world, currently ranked #35 by netcraft. Consequentially yesterday was the busiest day ever for this site.

The surprising insight that I got from this experience was that, financially, Slashdot have to work harder than probably any other site to generate revenue, because their audience is the most tech. savvy and adaptive of any website, and therefore the most capable of blocking adverts.

Based on the a comparison between the stats of an average day, and yesterday, I did a few sums, and discovered (from this small empirical sub-sample) that 37% of slashdot readers use advert blocking software. The sums tell me that an average story-page on this site serves 2 adverts, but yesterday, that average had dropped to 1.25.

Advert blocking software was developed as a remedy for annoying, flashing, vibrating and misleading adverts that make web pages difficult to read, or that mislead people into clicking on them. The downside is that responsible and relevant adverts are affected too.

The costs of being the busiest technical news forum on the web can’t be small, and Slashdot have to meet these costs whilst dealing with 37% less potential for generating revenue. The long term solution may be more adverts, attempting to increase the return from those who don’t block all ads, or it may a further shift towards the subscription model.

Either way, yesterday’s increased visitor numbers here have highlighted to me that generic advert blocking software is not the panacea it appears to be. Adverts are often necessary to cover operating costs, so a blanket ban affects the good sites as well as the bad.

It would not surprise me if anti-blocking measures are developed before too long. I can forsee something, perhaps in javascript, that descrambles a page based on a key that must be retrieved from the advert, or from the advert server.

Obviously such measures would themselves result in countermeasures, so the only real solution is the responsible use of ad blocking software. Currently however, software such as AdBlock and Remove It Permanantly are not designed with this responsibility in mind.

A short term solution may be the inclusion of a “Show Ad’s” toolbar button, similar to the “Show Images” button seen in many email applications, but long term, blocking software needs to be more aware of the kind of advert that’s being displayed and make more intelligent decisions of what to remove.