Ever since AdBlock was released in 2010 more and more internet users have started using it virtually blocking all internet ads.

These people claim ads that were shown to them were intrusive, annoying, even scary sometimes when the ads literally could read their minds and showed them offers on that new camera they wanted to buy but hadn’t told anyone yet (except Google of course, but that doesn’t count, still creepy). I’m guessing the real trouble would’ve come when it wasn’t cameras they were searching for…

It was obvious to all webmasters whose websites rely entirely or partly on advertising that we were losing some business because of users using AdBlock, but it was incredibly hard to estimate how much was actually being lost, until recently in 2013 PageFair launched allowing any webmaster to place a little tracking code on their website to learn how many of our users were actually not seeing our ads.

In my case, for an architecture website with content in Spanish, English and French and roughly 10K visits per day its 16%. 16% of people who visit the site are blocking ads and there for producing cero revenue. This numbers has grown by 2 points in just a month and one can only expect it will keep growing, which means soon enough we won’t make enough to keep generating new content (for free) and at one point maybe not even enough to keep our servers going, which means the site will go down and users will have to go and find their content elsewhere.

I do agree some website’s ads are intrusive and annoying, but to be honest when they are it’s because you are looking at arguably illegal websites anyways such as torrent downloads or similar. 98% of legal, decent, serious websites who rely on ads to survive actually show them in a very reasonable non-intrusive way.

Just a thought, we’ll see were this ends. I’ll keep updating if that 16% changes significantly.

For different reasons that are not important right now I’ve had two or three talks lately about how I would ideally raise a kid if I had to.

I come from a traditional education, but still I’ve been to seven different schools, which have given me a good idea of what’s out there. Private schools, public schools, religious schools, English schools (living in Spain)… Before you ask, I wasn’t kicked out of any of them!

My parents weren’t never too strict about school either, they would often make me miss one or two weeks of class to travel, never forced me to do my homework and always let me chose which school I wanted to go to (there you have your reason why I went to so many).

School didn’t make me unhappy, but most of the times it was definitely not something I looked forward too, all the contrary, I was always anxious to get out so that I could do the things I wanted to do, which of course changed often, from perfecting my tennis skills to tearing apart electronic equipment or building RC cars among many other things, the things I learned during that time I will never forget.

After watching Logan LaPlante’s talk I know I didn’t hack my schooling, but I definitely hacked my after class time, he has the opportunity to hack his days from beginning to end… lucky boy! (I’m not complaining).