Topic: Ad Blocker.

I like you to know that I will no longer be visiting this site cause lately every time I do it ask me to turn off my ad blocker and I'm not gonna to do that. Have a nice day. Thanks for making me stop visiting your site. I'll go else where for my Nintendo news.

I've checked it and I've found the js file that checks if you have an adblocker:
It's https://static.nintendolife.com/javascript/gn/sourcepoint.js
Block that file (in your adblocker) and you are good to go.

@Kdman thanks, that's fair enough. If you don't like what we do and don't want to support us, then it's probably for the best. If you'd like us to delete your account you can request that here: https://www.nintendolife.com/user/delete-account

@sanderev we'd appreciate it if you don't encourage adblocking as without ads the website simply wouldn't exist. We're not IGN or GameSpot backed by massive media companies, we're a small home-grown business with 10 or so staff, therefore, we need all the support we can get.

"without ads the website simply wouldn't exist."

No. You can easily run a website without ads and trackers. There are enough websites that allow users to get a paid subscription (see most news paper websites) or watch ads. I wouldn't really mind paying €1 / month for this website. But I do mind my privacy online and I really do not want to give any information to shady tracking / ad companies.

Also "we're small" doesn't really hold anything.

"© 2019 Nlife Media, part of Gamer Network."

Okay.. Gamer Network...

https://www.gamer-network.net/

"Founded in 1999, Gamer Network was acquired in 2018 by ReedPOP, home of events like PAX and the New York Comic-Con. "

ReedPOP isn't a small company. At least not according to Wikipedia.

@sanderev yeah, we're actually looking at having a subscription model for exactly that reason, but it's either subscription or ads, adblocking doesn't come into the equation.

And we're partners of Gamer Network (aka part of the network), they do our ad sales, we're not owned by them.

I'd use the site without an adblocker, but the ads are obnoxious. This is a nice, simply designed site, but turn of the adblocker and you get flashy, animated ads, one that even follows you as you scroll down all the while flashing and animating.
Why can't still image ads be a thing?

With viruses and targeted malware being distributed through well known ad companies, and ofcourse Google knowing everything about us. I started blocking all ads (without exception) early 2017.

I use a four level protection here:
1. DNS, filters most of the requests and stops the most dangerous ones from even entering my network.
2. Router, my main router has adblocking built in and will stop most not stopped by 1.
3. Browser, stops misbehaving websites and removes elements blocked by 1 & 2. Also stops adblock detection scripts. Like the one I mentioned above.
4. New software I'm developing that will help with some of the automation of this.

I've blocked over 10 million ads and 9 million trackers since early 2017. Because yes, all of this is logged.

This all has one goal; to protect my privacy online and not sharing anything I do not want to share with the world.
Also I don't like ads in general. I will never watch or click on them, so why slow down my internet and have them load?

I do want to help support though, I do so by paying subscriptions for multiple websites right now. I have Amazon Prime (which helps Amazon and Twitch streamers), Youtube premium (which helps content creators on YT) and a few news based websites.

@sanderev I can appreciate the concerns. To be honest we’ve been waiting for a simple sub system rather than doing our own. Out of the news websites you sub too which systems do they use? Or are they all different?

@Cotillion advertisers sadly want more media rich ads for their brands... like your avatar

I actually just disabled my ad blocker to see the message out of curiosity as I usually keep Nintendo Life whitelisted, this is new to me. I understand ads are there to help support the site, so I usually keep sites I visit regularly whitelisted for that reason.

Personally, I only use an ad blocker to avoid the more malicious ads out there, like pop-ups. Haven't run into any troublesome ads on here.

I've seen most websites either combining their ad efforts or doing their own thing mostly. There are some standard issue scripts, but those are already all blocked by all current adblockers.

And I do understand the issue, being a small developer myself I do also feel it. But all of my websites are ad and tracker-free. Because I do not want to help the big ad agencies get more money. Because that is what happens if you put an ad on your website. Some company pays you a small amount for it, which is a very small portion of the money they make selling the data from the user.

For me it's quite simple, I see developing my website and software as a hobby and I have a normal day-job (developing software and websites for companies; which is business to business no ads there) which pays my bills. I don't need to make money off of my website. And I don't.
You guys do not have that "luxury", so I see why you place ads. But those ads are targeted ads with trackers built into them. Meaning the company that's tracking them is making all the money. (Doubleclick, google, etc)

Subscriptions could be done using Patreon, PayPal or you could do it yourself (but I don't advise doing that, since that would create all sorts of new problems) and as long as you keep it on the cheap side, like 1 euro / pound per month. (Which most websites use) I will gladly sign up to it.

Pretty much this in general...I hate ads, anywhere. They all have to be a video on autoplay with the volume exploding your speakers or something (I watch youtube a lot), or it's an image ad containing audio.

If NLife has a subscription with features worth getting, then I'd probably do it depending on the price. But yeah, I hate ads in general, they're annoying.

@antdickens Touche, but if the ads were as small as my avatar, they'd be a lot more tolerable than a giant rectangle that follows my scrolling

@sanderev @Joeynator3000 to make it worthwhile I think we'd have to charge $2.99/month or $29.99/year (inc. tax etc) which is less than the price of a coffee. This would allow ad-free access to all our sites (Nintendo Life + Push Square + Any future sites). We could also add a tracking-free option too I guess, so that it doesn't load any third party stats like Google Analytics etc (although annoyingly that would lower our vanity numbers!).

3 dollar month is about the price of Nintendo Switch Online. Which gives free games. $ 30 / year is even more expensive. That would absolutely be too much for me.

In comparison Disney+ is $ 7 / month.

@sanderev it's not a like for like service though is it? So that's not a fair comparison. Those companies have 1,000s of staff and 10s of millions of subscribers and therefore have scale to offer those prices. Even at $2.99 PayPal or whatever service will probably take around 50c straight away. I think that's totally a fair price considering you can have the website for free, by viewing ads.

@antdickens At $3/mo $30/yr the subscription service would probably be a failure.

Sure, a group of us dedicated regulars could justify that pricing, but that's hardly enough people to float the whole sub program. Yes, NYT is $15/mo (easily obtainable on endless sales for $4 or so)...but while we love NL, it's not exactly NYT material. A more even comparison would be GameStop Pro includes a PHYSICAL print magazine (Game Informer) monthly for $20/yr which also includes discount programs, rewards points on purchases, limited access sales, etc. Or $15/yr for all of the above and the digital mag. Yes, that's a big (failing) company, with thousands of staff, a retail operation, etc, etc. But the point is, like for like, the value comparison for an industry magazine doesn't add up.

I realize you don't have the circulation they have, but I think you're viewing it backward. You're viewing the economics of it from what the site needs to run, not what the subscribers will apply as the value. I favor a sub being available, but at that price the subscriber base will pretty much consist of the forum mods and participants of the chit chat thread, plus 25%.

I sympathize with what you're saying, I've been there, and that's why I'm here and not there today. But "We need to charge more and provide less value because we lack the scale of the big guys" can be heard echoing throughout empty, decaying, and bulldozed retail centers across the US across the street from a Walmart and Home Depot. Including GameStop, for that matter.

Apart from that, I can't imagine you're pulling in $3/mo per-user in ad revenue to offset via traditional advertisers without large, direct campaign sales. That would put you on par with some of the biggest portals on the net. That doesn't sound likely for little NL. The big mags like NYT/WSJ charge what they charge not to offset losses in digital ad revenue but to replace the losses in traditional print ad revenue and physical circulation sales, while showing YoY gains for a large publicly traded corporation. NL doesn't have the same legacy to balance.

$15/yr I could see. $20/yr is justified. $25 is pushing it pretty far. For $30, IMO, NL's content would have to expand in both quantity and quality exponentially to be readily justified. There's sort of a magic cutoff where the asking price far exceeds the value proposition at a glance. It's not the best or fastest news site for Nintendo by a mile. It's not the deepest, most complete editorial publication on Nintendo, either. It's a fun niche site that occupies a middle ground and has a good community, but that's a hard direct sale. Smashboards/Squidboards does $15/yr and it's "just" a forum, but it also has a much more sophisticated forum, events, matchups, prizes, etc. With editorial content I can see going slightly higher than them at $20. But absolutely no more than $25, and IMO that's pushing it a bit over the line to where it would appeal to an pretty small audience. But what is your per-user ad sell historically you're trying to offset? If it were over $1 I'd be amazed.

@NEStalgia I think I’d prefer $20/year as the target amount, but would need to find a payment system that supports that model. At the moment places like PayPal rinse you on small transactions, taking a % fee plus a flat amount then a currency exchange fee and cross border payment fee. Which means they probably take almost half the amount on a $1 payment. So if I can find the right payment system then a lower price will be more achievable.

@antdickens That definitely sounds much more realistic, but yeah - I'm aware of PayPal's percentage and flat fee, but I wasn't thinking of currency exchange and cross border in the equation. That does equate to a problem. Flat card based solutions tend to be messy (PayProGlobal and the like) and as a rule I generally avoid putting cards into most of them and just skip services that use them...there's always something sketchy to that stuff no matter how many reassurances you're given they're safe. Many of the places I know of that use those have eventually just switched to PayPal or Amazon Payments because it was otherwise a mess. And even there, international can be tricky and places try to have a US billing entity for them.

I can see where the $30 is coming from in that case....I don't think it would gain traction from a subscriber perspective, but I can see where you're coming from. At worst, maybe payment options - the cheap sketchy credit card vendor for the $20 crowd to get it at the right price, and the $30 option through PayPal for us dinosaurs that actually keep security in mind when doing things on the internet and aren't fond of spending years in ID theft limbo.

Or you can use the remains of Pure XBox to run a Bitcoin farm.

@NEStalgia yeah I’ll need to do more research. It’s been a while since I’ve seriously looked at it. I was hoping someone like Google would have a one click subscribe solution built into Chrome by now...