I absolutely love stumbling across sites like these, pissing and moaning about things like “bandwidth theft” and social sites failing to “obey” robots.txt “law,” and completely missing the fucking point of the concept of the Internet.

To those idiots out there who think the world wide web is solely your domain for simple monetization, and getting pissed when those dollars don’t instantly start rolling in, I’ve put together a little list of hints for you.

• Money will not just roll in if you put up a worthless site with nothing but affiliate links and “search engines” on it. People know where “real” search engines live and they generally know how to use them. If I hit a site and see it’s nothing but affiliate links (obvious sales pitches with no actual content), I leave. I don’t click the ads.
• “Ad blockers” are not stealing money or bandwidth from you. They’re enforcing their users’ wishes as to what materials they want their computers to download. This is my computer, and I do not want advertisements to appear on it. I paid for this machine, not you. I’ve paid for the internet connection I’m using, not you. And I’ve configured my machine not to store (or return) tracking cookies and not to show advertisements. You’re entirely welcome to try to block me from viewing your content, but:
  • You’re not likely to succeed (there are many ways around that nonsense)
  • Your content likely isn’t actually worth protecting like this anyway
• If your sole source of income is AdSense (or similar) ad click revenues, and your site gets featured on a site like Digg or Reddit, and you don’t want ten thousand (or more) new pairs of eyeballs looking at your pages, you’re a bona fide, Grade A, purebred moron. Even if you only “convert” one percent, you’ve still gotten a hundred clicks from those ten thousand viewers.
• The “bandwidth costs” you claim you’re “losing” from ad blocking users is zero. Do you understand how little I pay for my web hosting and just how much bandwidth I get for it? I can push six terabytes per month before they start charging me a whopping $0.01 per gigabyte in overage fees. For the record, Willfe.com actually consumed about 1.6GB of bandwidth per month (heh, woot!).
• You may catch a few “suckers” who actually click your links, but most will just move on to find the real sites they were trying to reach (versus staying on your “common misspelling squatter site”) without clicking your high-paying links.
• Finally, “robots.txt” is now “law.” It is a suggestion your site can offer to search engines and other automated tools that choose to honor it. There is no requirement (apart from one of etiquette) that any requester honor the contents of the file, or even to honor its existence. If your site is constructed such that it can’t operate properly if it weren’t for robots.txt stopping unwanted traffic, you’re doing it wrong.

Naturally, the real source of these complaints are not legitimately monetized web sites. It’s from people who buy random, throwaway (or typo-based) domains by the truckload, and set up hundreds (or thousands) of nearly identical sites on cheap virtual web hosting accounts that serve no legitimate content (sorry, folks, but even a long-winded, scrolling home page filled with a sales pitch doesn’t count as “content”). They probably do skirt close to the host’s bandwidth limits by virtue of their shoving hundreds (or thousands) of domains onto a single $8 per month account.

What I think happens is they might accidentally put something interesting on one of the hosted domains, or someone might convince them to let them piggyback their own (barely) more legitimate domain onto the hosting account. Someone either likes the content, or decides to try to get more hits for it by linking it on Digg or Reddit or Slashdot, and the extra traffic (which does sometimes bring legitimate clicks) pushes one site’s consumption over the limit and the idiot domain squatting sites go down too (since these cheap bastards wouldn’t want to pay $0.01 or less per gigabyte, after all).

If you really don’t want people “stealing” your precious content by loading just the content without loading the ads, don’t show your content to the whole world. Show it to people who’ve already paid you for access to your magnum opus, and shove it behind some kind of password-protected gateway or a shopping cart.

If you’re just trying to make cash with ads without adding anything legitimate to the content of the internet, you’re going to find a very unsympathetic audience when you start complaining that we’re all “stealing” your precious, worthless junk.

As to the supposed “theft” aspect of ad blocking technology, this is just absolutely stupid. It’s tantamount to the television industry whining about all those freeloaders who use old-fashioned antennas to pick up broadcast television signals, and change the channel when an ad comes on. Stop broadcasting it for free if you don’t want people taking it, well, for free.

Nimrods Just stop it and try creating something useful/beneficial/helpful/wonderful/amazing. Then you’ll have no end of revenue from your stupid ads.

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