If there's an arms race between ad-blockers and ad-blocker-detectors, the latter will win. All of the money and incentives are set up for them to do a better job.
How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
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Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#12I wonder why content website don't use Canvas rendering in order to block all ad-blockers. You either see the canvas, with ads in it or don't see anything at all. There need to be a compatible ad-network as well. Accessibility is going to be an issue but if you can solve all of that there is a startup idea right there!
As a user, that would certainly turn me off. The entire page being in canvas fundamentally breaks native functionality. Text selection, copy/paste, navigation keys. Most of these could be simulated but it would never feel truly native.
Heck, I get annoyed when on Snopes simply because I can't select any text (which I use to keep my place in the article).
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#13I like the idea of paying for subscriptions for no-ad service. However, the $1/week seems a little high. I might read 10 to 20 articles a year on wired.com. I do pay subscriptions for things that I use (almost) daily: Hulu no commercials version, Netflix, and Google Music. So, good idea, but I would expect a subscription to perhaps cost $10 to $15/year. Just my opinion...
Wired kind of agrees: if you subscribe to the print edition (~12/yr IIRC), you get access to the digital editions too.
The $1/week is a ridiculous grab from people who are unaware that there is a cheaper option available.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#14> we will restrict access to articles on WIRED.com if you are using an ad blocker well, i will restrict my viewing of WIRED.com then. Like completely.
Since they aren't making any money from your visits to their site anyways I doubt they will be losing a lot of sleep.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#15If there's an arms race between ad-blockers and ad-blocker-detectors, the latter will win. All of the money and incentives are set up for them to do a better job.
You can't really 'win' with an ad-blocker-detector, you can only win by committing virtual suicide on your website. Eyeballs have value other than just ads, for instance someone might have shared an article in an interesting way or to a well matching demographic which in turn led to a viral effect. Very hard to know which part of your audience is the one instrumental to keeping the flow of traffic up, and 20% is in the danger zone. Keep in mind that Wired's audience is fairly tech savvy and that is precisely the segment that may have caused Wired to be as well respected as they are in the first place. You don't risk alienating that 20% unless you're desperate.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#16How are they going to detect ad blocking? They're going to have to spend a long time fighting anti-ad block detection. You can't trust the client. Ads are displayed in the client. It would take hardware level ad serving to make ad serving and anti-ad blocking feasible.
Trivial answer: the webpage is a monolithic PNG. Good luck building a general-purpose image parser & modifier, especially on a webpage with embedded animations.
There are ways to make it very difficult to distinguish between content and ads, that's all you need to do. At the highest level, the content is the ads, which is usually what ends up happening to trade publications anyway.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#17If there's an arms race between ad-blockers and ad-blocker-detectors, the latter will win. All of the money and incentives are set up for them to do a better job.
I'd need you to clarify your idea of "winning", but I'm pretty sure I'd take the opposite side of this bet.
Ad-blockers will win because people find ads very annoying.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#18Desperate times call for desperate measures I guess. If you feel $1 per week ($50 / year) is too much remember that display ads to a targeted audience such as Wired's are worth CPM rates that you'd probably not believe. Tracking (oh, you thought this was about advertising?) you has value, and quite a bit of it. This ad-blocker wall thing is an interesting development (and Wired is definitely not the first site doing…
$1 per week doesn't seem like a lot when phrased that way. But when you think about all of the sites your adblocker blocks ads from on a daily basis, if it'd add up a lot of they all charged $1. I'd be ok with not consuming a good bit of content and paying for the small few I like, but I'm not sure that's sustainable. It'll be interesting to watch.
Micropayments, however, will never work. The main problem is that the jump from no payment to $1 is the biggest hurdle. If you can get someone to pay anything at all, you can probably get the to pay more than micropayment amounts, so your optimum payment is never a small one.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#19> So, in the coming weeks, we will restrict access to articles on WIRED.com if you are using an ad blocker. Good luck with that, Wired. The people-who-will-never-pay group will split into two: People who never visit your site again, and people who up the ante in the ad-blocking escalation. While you may think that you don't care about the people-who-will-never-pay group, the latter subgroup will release their improve…
I think they're betting the group of people who pay them $52/year will more than make up for it, at least in the short term.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#20I like the idea of paying for subscriptions for no-ad service. However, the $1/week seems a little high. I might read 10 to 20 articles a year on wired.com. I do pay subscriptions for things that I use (almost) daily: Hulu no commercials version, Netflix, and Google Music. So, good idea, but I would expect a subscription to perhaps cost $10 to $15/year. Just my opinion...
I'd prefer to pay, say, $10/mo for _all_ the content I read, and that's basically the very upper bound. I figure $120/yr is a much better deal than what they (where by "they" I mean all the news sources I read) are getting from ads right now. I don't click on ads, and brand advertisements don't pay shit.
Texture is an attempt to be that. Like Netflix they don't have everything you could ever want. But they have enough.