First, let’s recap, with a heavy dose of paraphrasing.
Jim Lynch, last week: “This Safari Reader stuff is bullshit. It’s going to cannibalize advertising revenue right across the web, and it will be a nightmare for publishers who are, after all, entitled to that revenue by virtue of the mere existence of their ad-riddled blogs.”
The world, in reply: “It’s not the reader’s responsibility to subject themselves to your shitty advertising. It is your responsibility to make your blog a good reading experience, by not employing shitty pageview-grabbing pagination, by not littering it with Google Adsense, by not plastering hundreds of sharing icons everywhere. If people use Reader, it’s not to evade ads, it’s because you greedy, entitled pricks make it impossible to actually read your shit.”
Jim Lynch, this week: “You’re all a bunch of fucking Apple apologists and you’re all wrong. That said, I have now made some changes to my ads and they’re less hostile, I have also added the ability to view my articles on one page and added a print feature.”
I wonder if Jim realises that what he frames as beating Safari at its own game is actually probably what Safari wanted all along.
Here’s what Jim and the rest don’t seem to realise. Revenue from Adsense and its ilk is a reward for writing content that made people want to visit your website and grant you a pageview. If you do it really well, you’ll get a bunch of pageviews, and a bunch of money. Employing tricks like needless pagination, auto-refreshing (see Salon.com), misleading headlines, and the like is cheating. You didn’t earn those pageviews, you tricked people into giving them to you. And then you look at shit like popups, popunders, double underlined links, Snap previews, Tynt scripts, and so on, and it’s pretty clear how hostile it all is. It’s nothing but money-grabbing. If you’ve got it set up so bad that your readers are employing things like ad blockers and Safari’s Reader, you fucked up. You did something wrong. You overestimated how much your readers are willing to tolerate. We all realise you rely on advertising revenue, but it’s not something you’re entitled to, it’s something you earn by cultivating a user base, and any revenue lost to ad blockers and Safari’s Reader is money you failed to earn this week, because you pissed off all your readers. That’s the game you play when your income relies on users actually wanting to look at your website.
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