Although low click-through rates are unfortunately the norm in online advertising, publishers have found ways to stay in business by charging per-view rates on their ad inventory. So what happens when consumers use ad-blocking software to remove all forms of online advertising?

According to Ars Technica Editor-in-Chief Ken Fisher, who posted an extensive memo about his website’s stance on ad blocking, ad-blocking software cheats publishers out of a lot of revenue.

Visitors who use ad blockers consume the publishers’ bandwidth and gain access to the content without providing the publisher with any revenue. Ars Technica, a website focusing largely on technology, has an above-average number of visitors who run ad blockers. “Imagine running a restaurant where 40 percent of the people who came and ate didn’t pay,” wrote Fisher. “In a way, that’s what ad blocking is doing to us.”

Reasearch by Ars Technica recently involved making their website inaccessible to anyone running an ad blocker. The experiment was successful, but Ars took a fair share of heat from its readership. Rather than completely shut out consumers, the website instead asked its readers to disable their ad blockers, if only to help the website’s bottom line.

You can read the details of the experiment here: http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/03/why-ad-blocking-is-devastating-to-the-sites-you-love.ars