> Premium ads can get well over an order of magnitude higher CPM, so the picture might not be quite as bleak as I’m making it out to be. But to get premium ads you need to appeal to specific advertisers. What advertisers are interested in an audience that’s mostly programmers with an interest in low-level shenanigans?

I've no experience marketing anything aimed at this audience, so have no idea what suitable companies think about this, nor what CPMs or CPAs they'd be used to seeing in their ad spends.

But as a rule of thumb, targeted means more interesting to advertisers who want to hit that audience. For example if a VPS company wanted to advertise, where better than on a popular programmer's blog? (Again I have no idea on what margins or target CPAs a VPS company would have, so just a random example.)

Of course, a targeted audience that doesn't interest any advertisers can have the opposite effect and drive your CPMs down, but more often than not it will help. It's just a question of will it help enough to justify the time getting the right advertisers to part with their money to advertise with you.

(I also have no experience either selling or buying adverts for personal blogs, but the above rule of thumb is pretty scalable.)

edit: Got distracted before finishing reading, and will now add my thoughts to his last paragraph:

> There’s the argument that ad blocking is piracy and/or stealing, but I’ve never heard a convincing case made. If anything, I think that some of the people who make that argument step over the line, as when ars technica blocked people who used ad blockers, and then backed off and merely exhorted people to disable ad blocking for their site. I think most people would agree that directly exhorting people to click on ads and commit click fraud is unethical; asking people to disable ad blocking is a difference in degree, not in kind. People who use ad blockers are much less likely to click on ads, so having them disable ad blockers to generate impressions that are unlikely to convert strikes me as pretty similar to having people who aren’t interested in the product generate clicks.

I make most of my living from people seeing digital adverts and I'd never argue its piracy or stealing. So I'm with the author on that one.

As to preventing people from reading your website if they don't disable adblockers - I think it's a shitty thing to do, it's not something I'd ever be willing to suggest anyone does, but at the same time I don't see why a website shouldn't at least be allowed to do it. If a site does it and you don't like it then stop visiting.

Personally I like sites that show "You're using an adblocker - you can keep using it if you like, but we'd really appreciate if you didn't". The reason for this is I disagree with the premise that those who use adblock won't click adverts. The number one reason for people using adblock is that too many advertisers/publishers allow shitty adverts. Adverts that pop out of the window. Or cover up content. Or use too much bandwidth or memory. Etc. If you're not one of those publishers, and you don't allow those kinds of advertisers on your site, then there's plenty of people who use adblock but might consider clicking on one or more of your adverts if they could be persuaded to view them. I'm not talking about asking them to click adverts, just that if they see them they might actually want to click on them.

I don't have data to back this up, but have a couple of people I'm going to talk to and hopefully see if I can get numbers to demonstrate this, as I'm confident its the case.

Alternatively if anyone reading this has a decent-sized audience (preferably with a high pageview to unique ratio - i.e. more loyal visitors rather than just visitors driven by search enginges) and would be interested in testing, feel free to get in touch to chuck about a couple of ideas. I couldn't really help on the execution side, but would happy to give advice on how to test if you'd be willing to share numbers with me afterwards. (The basic idea would be to see what % of people respond to polite requests to disable adblock, and how click rates are affected. If you have the technical chops to do more then could go further and either attempt to anonymously identify which clicks came from a previous adblock user, and also look at actual conversion rates rather than just click rates if your advertisers allow you access to this data.)