Surfing around digg I came across a story linking to whyisdiggblocked.com. The motivation behind “Why digg is Blocked” is that users of social bookmarking sites (whydiggisblocked.com refers to them as social media sites) support ad blocking and even if ads are displayed social bookmarking users are three times less likely to click ads than Google users are. That little statistic comes from a blog at Sitepoint. Whydiggisblocked.com equates ad blocking to “unauthorized bandwi[d]th theft”.

Reading this made me think about this very site. Most content sites on the Internet are ad supported. Betaflow is attempting to be ad supported. I took a look at last month’s traffic statistics and compared them to ad impression statistics. Out of all page views on this site, only 48% actually counted as an ad impression. The good news? Click-through-ratios are well above 50%.

Based on my analysis here, it seems pretty clear that most technology-savvy web users are blocking ads (conclusion drawn on Betaflow’s target audience being geeks). Which brings me to the question: Is ad blocking ethical? Is it stealing? Is Whydiggisbloked.com right? It costs money to run a web site: hosting, advertising, payroll, etc. If viewers are unwilling to pay subscription fees and unwilling to view advertising, what are visitors offering to the publisher besides the glory of being loved by millions (ok, thousands)?