ISPreview investigates how the Internet is turning more commercial

However with the introduction of newer ad-blocking technologies, any recovery is likely to be hampered. It's ironic that the very people these sites exist to help and inform (you and I) could also be the ones to send it to its deathbed, all due to a lack of understanding. By preventing such sites from forming an income through blocking ads, we're also forcing them to find more drastic and often commercial methods in order to stay afloat.

Very few high quality sites can exist without some kind of advertised funding and so you have to ask yourselves, which would you prefer? Would you rather put up with the banners and pay nothing, but maybe give the odd click on them, or would you rather pay a small monthly fee? Roughly 80%+ would prefer to keep the banners, yet many aren't prepared to stop blocking them. In short, we can't have the best of both worlds.

Ultimately very few Internet users care for the consequences their online actions have, sites have to get their revenue from somewhere and it can help by making a habit of clicking on the banners for sites we visit, simple because we understand their importance and survival.

The Final Word

Information websites are big business across the globe, it's for this reason alone that the Future Network (magazine publishers) recently had to cut several magazines and axe hundreds of jobs. They found online sites were pulling readers away from their 'real' magazines, if we're not careful they might see this as a golden opportunity to push for a commercialised online world.

By way of a practical example, ISPreview doesn't 'rely' on advertising to survive, at least not in the short term, as it's funded out of our own pockets. Yet we still have large hosting fees to pay and until the industry recovers that's eating an ever-increasing hole in our pockets. If it continues to do so then sites like ours will become un-worthy of continued expansion and improvement, ultimately dieing.

In the end the industry will have to change and become more adaptive; if it doesn't then we face an increasingly commercialised online world, where pay-per-view models are commonplace. It's ironic that just as we begin to see well priced Internet access; it suddenly becomes the Internet itself that's being forced to change.

The future is, as ever, an uncertain one.

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