IMHO, the type of person who installs adblock isn't the type of person you can sell things to easily. They're decidedly anti-mainstream, anti-corporate, probably not particularly rich, etc.
So it's not just a matter of convincing their userbase to stop blocking ads, you'd need to tell their current userbase to go away, and invite a better userbase to come and click on ads.
Reddit created this problem by fostering a culture of anti advertising early on.
Reddit should probably just become some non-profit foundation like wikipedia and show begging adverts.
> IMHO, the type of person who installs adblock isn't the type of person you can sell things to easily. They're decidedly anti-mainstream, anti-corporate, probably not particularly rich, etc.
[citation needed]
Could just be that the people installing AdBlock don't like being distracted by multitudes of flashing popover and automatically playing videos. I doubt it's anything to do with being anti-mainstream or anti-corporate.
They should focus their efforts on redditgifts (http://redditgifts.com/) and consider putting it on the main site instead of on a separate domain. Their users may not like to buy mainstream products but they definitely like to buy quirky, off-the-wall things as evidenced by `Shut Up And Take My Money`'s success with advertising on Reddit. They've already got the right idea with the marketplace model. They should (if they're not already) focus on trying to attract unique products through a program similar to Steam's Greenlight and stop focusing so much on advertising. Advertising and Redditors -- generally speaking -- are not a good match.
While you are responding to a poorly-defended stereotype/generalization, I actually think your anecdote is worse: the userbase of this website is, on the whole, going to be almost entirely "rich"; even if 99% of Adblock users are "poor", if you thereby polled Adblock users here you would not be able to discover this phenomenon due to the pre-selection.
So it's not just a matter of convincing their userbase to stop blocking ads, you'd need to tell their current userbase to go away, and invite a better userbase to come and click on ads.
Reddit created this problem by fostering a culture of anti advertising early on.
Reddit should probably just become some non-profit foundation like wikipedia and show begging adverts.