They could deal with advertisers themselves and manually approve and display text/image ads from their own domain (as it was done in printed newspapers), but isn't it easier to just leave a div+javascript and have the right of arbitrary code execution in a chunk of your page get auctioned off to the highest bidder by several shady ad network?

Just go to www.bbc.com and look at what domains your ad-blocker denies: edigitalsurvey.com, chartbeat.com, googletagservices.com, scorecardresearch.com, effectivemeasure.net, iperceptions.com, krxd.net, optimizely.com... now imagine if your printed newspaper shot at you a GPS receiver with a mic, a cam, etc. Surely it wouldn't be morally wrong to duck and avoid that bug?

You're still susceptible to ad-blocking if you serve an plain image ad from your own domain though, which sucks for those of us who do it. If there is a way to alert users that you vet, self-serve, and don't use animated ads, I'd love to know about it :)

Uhm, I use uBlock Origin and when going to the site in your profile I don't see any image blocking (just google analytics and social media plugins). The ads in the sidebar (id="ws_widget__ad_codes-3"?) display just fine, and I would say that your site is the perfect example of how ads should be: highly relevant, static, well designed, correctly integrated in the look and feel of the page...

The last time I checked with Adblock or Adblock plus (I don't remember which) I seem to remember it filtering out commonly used indicators of ads like divs with ad-related names or filenames containing _300x250_ etc... I could be mistaken though.

Thanks for the kind words too, I've really tried to make the site a place that I would personally like to browse and am glad to hear other people feel the advertising is nicely done.

I happen to disagree with that method of blocking ads because of false negatives and false positives; isn't the solution simply to remove the offending patterns from your filenames?

I'll add to the praise for your site. Your ads remind me somewhat of those from The Deck [1], although yours are nicer because they're 1st-party. Are you able to share any info. about the model? Do advertisers pay per click or per impression? If the latter, how do you prove your traffic figures to them, or have you built up a suitable level of trust?

[1] http://decknetwork.net/

Yeah, filename changing is what I would end up doing.

As far as the model is concerned, a lot of the industry is familiar with magazine advertising so I just go with a monthly rate to keep things simple. There is trust involved, though most run a trial before committing to anything longer-term so they are able to see if the level of generated activity meets their expectations.

It is much easier to do this kind of advertising because the content itself is so narrow that the readership ends up being narrow, whereas a general site like BBC or CNN you end up having a wide audience and then end up needing tracking tools to help narrow the audience into smaller groups.

Ads are usually filtered by the serving URL, so ads such as yours shouldn't be blocked. I just tested the site in your profile as well, and the ads were there, even with uBlock enabled. There weren't any visual differences loading the page with/without it.

Many sites have a "please don't block ads" notice. Could you notify users via that method?

Obviously it wouldn't work 100% of the time, but it might yield interesting results.

In mitigation I run a smallish B2B news site and I only run ads we've sold direct (and vetted) and Google Adsense to fill some of the unsold inventory. However, I found out not too long ago that Adsense now throws stuff from literally hundreds of ad networks at its clients, which is definitely not what I expected when I signed up all those years ago. I've had to go in and manually turn them off, and will soon be turning off Adsense altogether. I'm not seeking to maximise my display advertising revenue though, as I've observed it usually comes at the expense of irritating readers.

I only direct sell my ads as well. Are your ads served via an ad network?

We use Google DFP to manage the actual serving of our ads, simply because it is very, very good at it.

Not everyone has the ability or desire to personally sell ads. I think it's pretty cool that today you can earn maybe $1000/mo with a moderately popular website you run yourself.