The Editorials

Those Ad Blockers

Written by Jeff Krasky

This editorial has nothing to do with country music. It's about the web sites that you visit to get information about your favorite country stars. As you may know many of these sites are supported by banner advertisments only. You might also be aware that the banner advertisement industry has fallen flat on its face over the past year or so. This has left many sites struggling and put just as many off the web.

The staff here at Women of Country has never really made a dime on the web site. There are a lot of costs associated with running a web site. There are web hosting bills that must be paid, computer hardware that must be bought, software upgrades that need to be installed in order to stay current. Then when you run a music site you've got additional costs. For example just about every album reviewed on this web site is purchased by a staff member, regardless of if it's an album we end up loving or hating. There are exceptions to this rule. There are some publicists and record labels who see the value in web publicity and are generous enough to provide us with a review copy of the album. Small things like that help a lot!

I don't even expect to make money off the web site. That isn't what Women of Country is about. It's about making sure that the female country artists we love to listen to get the exposure they deserve. We do this because we're big fans of the music. I expect to spend money to be able to do that. I would do it even if I was losing more than I am.

The problem I have is when people start taking away the only source of revenue we have to make back even a small portion of what we put out. Yes, I'm talking about ad blocking software. Everytime a reader runs ad blocking software and visits their favorite web pages they are actually taking money away from the people who work very hard to provide them with a place to gather and share their interests. Pop up ads are annoying. I don't like them either and try to minimize their appearances on the site. But they are about the only thing that brings in any kind of money at all anymore. So when people block those as well as the standard ads they are making it harder for web site developers to continue to provide the content they do.

Advertising is a way of life on TV and radio. You're forced to listen to it or watch it in those mediums. There is no way around it. If you're using the service you're paying for it through watching or listening to advertisments. So while it might seem that you're getting something for free you really aren't. And the people who are working to provide the services get paid in the process.

The problem with the Internet is there is no way to really force people to view advertisements. There are but people then just don't visit your site which in turn hurts you more than having them block the ads. So web developers and banner ad companies try to come up with other ways to show ads. We have small banners that we show and advertisers just don't feel they are working. So they don't buy them. The end result was the popup ad. This sent people into a rage so the popunder ad was born. This allows the popup to show up under the web browser and people still continued to block them. The end result is that web developers are about out of options to make money off their web sites.

The point of this editorial is to just bring to your attention that information isn't free. The biggest blessing and the biggest curse of the Internet is making information available for nothing. But even what appears to be free has costs associated with it. Everyone who works on this web site works other jobs full time. This means a lot of late nights and weekends spent working on the site. This lets us pay for the costs associated with providing this web site to you. The same is true for any web site you visit.

What's the point of all of this? I guess it would just be to request that everyone turn those ad blocking pieces of software off. It's annoying yes. But so is watching more commercials in a half hour than the program you want to watch on TV. In comparison closing a window in a web browser doesn't seem like that big of a deal. No one can force you to do this. I wouldn't even try to. But it sure would help out the web sites that everyone enjoys visiting if those programs were turned off and let us get back a little bit of the time and money we put out to provide the services.

Enjoy the web site and thanks for reading!

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