Post by Yinepuhotep
Recently I've been seeing more and more pages that load with large blocks of space on them requesting that I whitelist Wowhead in my ad blocker. I will not be whitelisting Wowhead. This post is made to explain why, and give those, who may not have known their options, information they can use to make their own informed choices.
My adblocker pre-loads the only whitelist I will ever use. The criteria for being added to that whitelist are posted for anyone to read at
https://www.eff.org/dnt-policy.
If a website is on that whitelist, I see its ads. If it's not, I don't. While I value the information available here, I value my ability to control my web browsing experience more. That is why I use ad blocking software. All well-written ad blocking software relies on the EFF's DNT whitelist, which means, whether it's Adblock Plus, Ad Nauseum, Disconnect, or Privacy Badger, it only blocks ads from websites that do not conform to the best practices for protecting user privacy and security.
If a website has to ask me to whitelist its ads, that tells me the website is NOT conforming to standard practices for protecting user privacy and security, and therefore it is in my best interests to NOT whitelist its ads.
tl;dr: The day you get Wowhead on the EFF Whitelist, I'll see your ads. Until then, I'll keep my privacy and security.
Post by Sas148
Since this just seems to be general feedback about why you won't disable your ad blocker, as opposed to ad issues on the site itself, I won't muddy the waters with ad specific discussions that we've been addressing* on a ongoing basis for months (and in some cases years) and will continue to address for the foreseeable future.
In respect to your desire to continue using your adblocker: I understand your position. I see it's a hard line for you and I respect that. However, you say you value the information available here but don't wish to see our ads (due to failing to conform to the eff.org DNT policy) and as such, I would respectfully ask that you
consider our Premium subscription. It's just $1/month or $9/year for you to entirely remove ads and gain some additional perks in the process.
Ideally, users would either view the ads on the site (within limits: we're always combating ads we consider to be bad or disruptive) or sign up for Premium. Anyone who doesn't participate in one of those two options is therefore expecting everyone else to shoulder the cost of the site while they still benefit from the services provided. I would hope it's clear that if enough people block the revenue of the site, and don't participate in Premium, the site will eventually fail... and this is true all across the web. I hope you, and others, will consider Premium.
Thank you.
* If anyone has concerns about ads they do see on our site I encourage you to read the following threads on the issues we're addressing on a ongoing basis, like what is and isn't a bad/disruptive ad, how to report those type of ads, and what we've done, plan to, or are doing about site performance for those in the community viewing our ads:
Bad Ads and How to Report ThemAd Frequently Asked QuestionsSite/Ad Performance Updated(##RESPBREAK##)2##DELIM##Sas148##DELIM##
Post by Erorus
It kinda seems like tossing in a sales pitch here is in poor taste.
It's not a sales pitch. This complaint comes up every time there's an ad thread and a Wowhead rep humbly asks for people to consider buying premium. The gist of the situation is this:
User: "Ads suck! I block ads and use your website for free!"
Admin: "We understand that ads suck, and we're trying to make them better. If you don't like ads, but you do like Wowhead, then you can support us by buying premium. Then you don't get ads!"
User: "OMG you want me to pay for a complex site that I use every time I play? The nerve!"
Basically you want to take content, and make sure that Wowhead does not get any payment (either in your dollars or ad dollars). Just because you don't like the payment options doesn't mean you're justified in not paying anything.
Let's be honest here -- if this were a top-of-the-list concern for you guys, the issue would have been resolved by now.
...
it might be time to take a small revenue hit while you work things out even if it means going into the red for a week.
LOL, a week? Trust me, if they could spend a week with no ad revenue to solve all ad problems, they'd take it.
You do realize that ZAM is at the mercy of their ad partners and they don't control every ad (or even control the system that picks ads), right? ZAM has very little control over who buys ads and what the ad content is. All they can really do is blacklist ad categories or specific ad purchasers.
The entire web advertising industry pretty much works the same way. You have a large number of people with ads they want to show. They go to ad networks and set up complex rules for the kinds of audiences they want to target, and how much money they'll pay to reach them. Ad networks represent hundreds of websites with available ad slots. Every time a page is loaded, its ad slot is sold in an automated real-time auction to the advertisers interested in that website's audience. Since there are thousands of websites and thousands of ad buyers, they can't all communicate directly one-on-one, so they go through ad networks who take a cut of the ad revenue to act as a marketplace to bring those two groups together. Unfortunately, these ad networks have little incentive to police their ad buyers carefully, since it's not their websites they're representing. Whoever can spend the most money for an ad slot (and isn't blocked by honestly-my-ad-is-this-category-really filters) gets it.
As far as ad networks that actually do filter their ads well? That painstaking filtering adds overhead, which cuts into the website's ad revenue. And fewer advertisers want to go through the filtering for every ad they want to buy a slot for, and fewer buyers in the auctions lowers revenue as well.
This is a systemic problem with web advertising. This isn't something ZAM can fix on its own, certainly not in a week. You can hop to different ad networks, hoping they police their ads better (and ZAM has done that a bunch of times), but either they have technical issues handling the volume of requests, or they don't have as many buyers looking for ad slots, or their buyers just aren't interested in your audience, or a huge number of reasons why switching risks a permanent, significant revenue drop.
It's only a matter of time before there IS a competitor out there, and right now I feel like there are many people that would flock to it.
Not without the comments and screenshots. I've thought about it. But all it takes is a user to visit the new site once, look something up, find no comments, then they'll just use Wowhead anyway. Look at WoWDB.
As a developer myself, I have never seen a website so dramatically influence system performance when a vast majority of its content is text. Even looking at the source code, there's so much dedicated to ad services compared to actual content that it's mind-boggling.
Just making sure you know: almost all the ad code is not ZAM code and is not under their control. As far as ZAM/Wowhead ad code, there's a single client-side file that handles setting up ad slots and skins on Wowhead. Then there's the ad network's script (which Wowhead doesn't control) that actually pulls in the ads and their scripts. Pretty much any single significant part of Wowhead has more code than what Wowhead staff wrote to manage ads.
I don't know if it's since you were acquired by ZAM or whoever, but the priorities have certainly shifted from "We're doing this because we're fans and we love the game" to "We're doing this to squeeze out every penny at any cost", and while I totally understand earning a profit is the goal (and would have the same goal myself) it seems like your standards have gone out the window.
They won't say it, but the situation is
not "We make so much money, and if we host these crappy ads, we'll make even more money!" The situation is more "We have X% of our users blocking ads, and that percentage is growing. We have costs A, B, and C every quarter and it's difficult to meet those numbers. We can't reduce ad slots or switch networks or whatever without significantly jeopardizing the whole operation, and even in the best case, those people still won't stop blocking ads." Their backs are against the wall, IMO. It's not dire, but it's not sunshine and roses, either. They have challenges they'll have to beat to keep going, and the tide is against them. They know it. So it's not greed, and it's not even unique to ZAM. It's just trying to sustain a Web business while the entire Web continues blocking ads and not paying for content.
I'm on a water-cooled quad-physical-cores system with 32GB of DDR3 running on a PCI-E SSD as for my OS + important programs, and if I have multiple WowHead tabs open in Chrome it becomes practically unusable. It's not as bad as on my laptop, but the browser is noticably degraded and it's 100% because of Wowhead.
It's 100% because of the ads, which ZAM doesn't control. (Well, I'll say 90%. There's always room to improve.) Ad buyers have no incentive to keep their audiences' web browsers performant. Ad slot buyers just want you to notice their ad for the least cost. That doesn't lend itself to nice code.
If you had Wowhead premium, you'd see how performant Wowhead is without ads. It's pretty dang nice.
I don't know if, as developers, optimization is important to you... but on every project I have, it's almost an OCD thing for me to make things optimized as possible.
I've worked with
Jerek for years, and that dude is always looking to make things work better. He often goes back and optimizes working code on our pages so that it works better. That said, developers don't have free reign to just
gold-plate everything all the time. There's new stuff added to WoW all the time that needs to be added to the site, or there's bugs to fix, or many other higher priorities than just making everything go faster. "Why doesn't ZAM hire more devs to make the site better?" you might ask. It's because they can't justify the expense. Because ad revenue isn't robust enough, and Wowhead Premium's a hard sell. You get what you pay for.
I literally cannot load more than one tab at a time on it because of the performance implications; it's absolutely absurd, and I would be completely overjoyed to provide you with any logs necessary so you can see for yourself how absolutely ridiculous it is.
Ads, man. Not under their control. Ad networks sell to other networks sell to advertisers who place bids on slots and someone wins and loads their scripts to show their ads and.. yeah. It's a nightmare. Welcome to the modern Web.
I have not become a subscriber literally BECAUSE of this issue; not only do I refuse to on principle, but I refuse to financially support a site that seemingly relies on the bait-and-switch tactic of "reduce quality; restore quality on payment" ...
And this is a common refrain. All I can hear is, "I will not pay money to view your site, and I will not view ads to support your site, but I will still use your site, because I'm entitled." You certainly have a valid complaint, ads do suck, but you lose all moral authority when you decide to continue using the site with an ad blocker. "I think the price that Starbucks charges for coffee is ridiculous, and their trade practices in developing nations is abhorrent, but I will still use their wifi and hang out there with my friends." Yeah, no. You don't get to benefit without paying anything while keeping a clean conscience. The right thing to do is to simply take your business somewhere else.
So, and while I don't mean to imply any one of you (you being the WowHead staff, administrators, and developers) are at fault, and while it probably came off this way I don't think anybody is intentionally trying to screw anybody over or is in a spinning chair with a cackling, evil laugh counting the proceeds from intentionally poor advertising,
Well, at least this is a more measured comment.
I do think you you guys could be doing more to resolve this, are unable or are unwilling to go all the way to do so (whether it's your call or is the call of ZAM or whoever is really calling the shots -- and I know that even if that's the case, you'd never be able to admit it), and because of this... honestly, I'm sure you guys are in a rough spot yourselves and may even not know the best way to handle this whether its from a technical or community perspective.
They know it sucks, believe me. They are in a rough spot. I can tell you with all sincerity that when I worked at ZAM and discussed the ad issues with all of the staff, from the CEO on down, every one of them had the concerns of the users at the forefront. Nobody was trying to milk the userbase for money or taking advantage of Wowhead's position in the fansite community. It was always, how do we make the experience better for users while keeping the doors open and the lights on. Again, this is a tricky problem that the entire Web is facing: users don't pay for content, ads pay for content, and users hate ads. Different parts of the web have different audiences and revenue streams and are affected in different ways. It's just especially painful for gaming websites right now, IMO.
I apologize for the wall of text, but as both a WoW player of over a decade, a (subjectively) loyal Wowhead user of almost just as long, and as somebody who's been a web designer/developer for 12+ years it is the most frustrating thing in the world to continuously see these issues day after day, month after month, year after year... and then look back and realize I've seen hardly any constructive changes to remedy the issues in almost that entire period of time.
I don't want to stick my nose into Wowhead's business too much. I know it's not my place to do so. To be clear:
I do not speak on ZAM/Wowhead's behalf. But, having used Wowhead since 2008 (and working there for almost 4 years) I have some knowledge about what's going on and I feel compelled to answer some concerns from a perspective that a current employee cannot. (I hope they don't mind!)
Come on, guys - either do what it takes to fix things, admit that you're unwilling or unable to completely do so, or admit that it's not the priority you've implied it to be because people can circumvent the problem by paying for a solution.
The TL;DR of this is the same as always: ads suck. The staff knows they suck. They're trying to fix the situation as best they can, but their options and resources are limited. They do not just want people to pay for Premium to make the problem go away. Premium is just an option they offer.
Don't be a @#$%. Either pay for Premium, or view ads, or take your business elsewhere. Or continue to use the site while blocking ads, but don't feel righteous about it. Nobody's getting rich here. This stuff costs real money. Appreciate that.