Did you know that blocking ads truly hurts the websites you visit? We recently learned that many of our readers did not know this, so I'm going to explain why.

There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won't hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis. If you have an ad blocker running, and you load 10 pages on the site, you consume resources from us (bandwidth being only one of them), but provide us with no revenue. Because we are a technology site, we have a very large base of ad blockers.

Those of you who are regular readers of Ars' science content are probably aware of our use of Digital Object Identifiers, or DOIs, which act as online reference information, taking readers directly to the papers being discussed. Readers almost never comment about that feature, except when it fails, in which case we invariably hear about it—and it fails at least once a month. We've tried explaining both our reasons for using them and the reasons they break in the forums, and have recently linked to Ed Yong's excellent discussion of the system and its problems. Within a week, we were dealing with complaints due to a broken DOI. So, this is an attempt to provide a comprehensive description of the DOI system, why we use it, and why it doesn't always work smoothly.