The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

That would break the atmosphere here that attracts many visitors. It would become something horrible like IGN

 

There is: sponsorship. Look at what Linus done. Instead of QQ he inserts ads into his content and you can't block that and those ads are safe and do not slow your browsing or track you or can infect you.

But you are correct but only if the commodity of this site is only it's users/readers and nothing else.
Sorry, I do not want to be a commodity for sale.

analytics.google.com 127.0.0.1 is in my hosts file.

Find a proper way to do ads if you live off of them. Also there are some very good suggestions here in this thread.
They (G3D) need to adapt, not "beg". Sell your visits to potential sponsors. They send you something to review? Sure, we have 500K visitors, we will review it for XYZ $$$ (example) or whatever. Some sort of subscribe is also a good option, just needs to be thought out well.

anyway, best regards to everyone from someone that makes ads for print and gets payed to make ads.

 

Sorry about that...

Adblocker is deactivated for Guru3d.com. :bang:

 

The problem is this leads to the perception that you're being paid to provide favourable reviews, the site needs to remain as impartial as possible to retain the trust of its readers so really is not a viable choice with which to provide the majority of funding.

 

I have this site whitelisted, except when viewing in on my mobile to save on my limited bandwidth.

Any chance of a mobile site version?

 

Of course there is. I understand your example, but what makes an article unique is content like critic, opinions, observations, predictions, ect. The biggest written article seller on Guru3D is GPU reviews. It's the same hardware every other site gets. But people potentially come to Guru3D for a consensus, the opinion from a person or personality that may know more then you or provide a different point of view. Obviously Guru3D does that already, but it needs to be done more often. People come here for, in the end, Hilbert's opinions.

Of course I understand that. And that's what he's signed up for. You can create all the excuses you want, if this ain't your dream job then it's time to move on.
If it is your dream job, then here you go, https://www.youtube.com/user/hhagedoorn/videos. I've seen channels in worse shape, just needs some TLC, some real content.

I'm sorry to inform you but this is already not possible. The vast majority of the hardware that gets reviewed here is supplied free direct from the company, which for an unseasoned journalist would indeed create a huge bias.
This comes down to the classic case of simply knowing your writer. I've seen plenty of articles pan a product that was provided to them, or pan something that the company sponsored.
It's all fair game, assuming that the content creator makes it known that they are being sponsored or was provided something. This is something that even Hilbert doesn't do (and REALLY should be doing).

 

Ads make me want to vom but I whitelisted Guru3D after this request because it's one of my most favourite sites. As long as the ads don't become too intrusive it'll stay whitelisted. One thing though, the more I allowed in ghostery the more things started appearing in ghostery. I'm going to allow some things but not everything because it was starting to get out of hand. I'm not going to whitelist Google Analytics (or indeed any analytics) or double click. Sorry.

 

More LInux Gaming news and the ads will be back. PC does NOT mean just windows

 

Each article imo has a large amount of personal opinion, throughout the SKU specific sections and of course the final conclusion page of each review would be pretty worthless without it.

It's not an excuse, it's simply the way it is - there are only a certain number of hours in a day! So your solution is to do the impossible or shut up shop?

So basically you are suggesting Hilbert pays for all the hardware himself rather than the hardware vendors supplying it? How exactly is that meant to happen and who is going to pay for it? Looking at it from the other direction, if all vendors provide all hardware then it can't really be argued that any of them are favoured over another.

Unfortunately this isn't an ideal world, some things are not viable or are just plain impossible

 

I'm sorry Guru3D! Now you're on the greenlist! Thank you for asking for it nicely and thank you for your content!

 

Don't worry Sir HH, I got your back here. Never used AdBlock on Chrome.

 

Cyberdyne is giving good advice, as he usually does. In this post you're really just putting words in his mouth and refuting his points piecemeal when he is suggesting a pretty large revamping of the business plan of the site.

The general thrust of the point, if I may, is that the appeals to people to whitelist guru3d really only stave off the inevitable, which is a continuing decline in ad-revenue.

 

No, I'm trying to understand what his point is. What I'm seeing is 'turn Guru3D into a Youtube channel which uses ad revenue to survive.'

If providing a counter argument to explain why things are the way they are is 'putting words into his mouth and refuting points piecemeal' (basically the same thing he just did) then seriously f*ck it, I'm done.

 

While I'm pretty sure there are plenty of ways for Guru3D to "revamp" its business, many of those carry risks and/or massive increases in required manpower to achieve (costly). While I would love to see this site grow, it should only be done if the team behind it can and is willing to put even more effort and perhaps even their own money into it.

On the subject of adblocking, I personally don't use it unless I'm browsing some really shady sites (ahem, and I'll also use noscript). I guess I've just grown pretty used to ads and don't even see them much anymore unless they are popup or set to autoplay videos with audio, which are extremely annoying.

 

Whitelisted

Thankyou Hilbert and all the Guru3d staff, you guys have one of the best tech/hardware sites on the net...

TechnikL

 

That's fantastic, I agree there is opinion in there and the facts are necessary. I think you misunderstand what I am referring to.
Just from the main screen these come to mind,
http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/galaxy-view-tablet-has-18-4-inch-screen.html
http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/thecus-adds-n5810-to-5-bay-nas-line-up.html
These things litter the site, it's simple information pasted from the company. You can take bits of it and Google it, you will find like 50 other site with the same information verbatim.

Why is that the only two options. I'm saying it won't be easy. Of course it is possible. What I'm suggesting is not unreasonable. Start easy, learn it. Going to an event? Might as well commentate. Gonna review something? Commentate on an unboxing (as cheezy as those are). Once it kicks off and you (or someone you get to make the videos) gets better and you start seeing the money that is there, you can cut back on the copy pasta articles, you can cut back on the obtrusive ads.

It's not rocket science.

EDIT

Doesn't have to be that. As I said, Jim has gone ad free on YT using patreon.

The point is if the strategy is "people need to turn off ad block or this all dies" then welcome to failure.
People like videos. It's simply the working idea right now. Sometimes reality sucks. But places have shown that you can make the best of it, and you end up connecting with your audience more then you ever did before.

 

Whitelist done. Love Guru3d
I wouldn't mind a donate button but paid subs sorry no thx.

 

exeption of the native linux game most of the game work on linux with crossplatform stuff (wine etc...) and for the other there is always a partition in ntfs for a windows OS on a linux gaming PC...

 

Clearly we are at cross purposes; I am referring to reviews and you are talking about the news posts. But again, it is down to time constraints and also the fact that once you start injecting an opinion into news posts it becomes less objective.

In fact I think expanding the Youtube channel would be a good idea, but then you have to produce content for it which takes as long, if not longer than publishing written articles so again, time constraints.

I am not trying to shoot down any ideas, ideas are good - keep them coming. But realistically some things simply aren't viable with the resources available.

 

I agree that a donate button can't hurt, I'd much rather make a donation to a website than have to see ads. I'm so used to using adblockers that I find it hard to recognize websites with the adblocker off.

As for the copy pasted content, yeah sometimes it's a little jarring to see a sentence or two that clearly could have benefited from a small edit but it's no big deal.

I don't understand how HH reviewing products he is sent by the manufacturers is some kind of breach of journalistic trust, that's ridiculous, it's not like HH's reviews are a page of text in which he just states some kind of unfounded opinion.

If anything, I'd like to see more in depth reviews of PSU internals (but maybe that's just me) and less awards being given to product variants, like various versions of the same GPU.

In other words, try to separate the GPU review from the board review. GM200 is a stellar GPU we got that, but does every aftermarket cooler version need an award ?