Wonder if they've considered Instant Articles. Loads instantly for users and has ads as well.
How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
111–120 of 390 posts
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#112Desperate 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…
Their $1 per week only says that they won't serve ads to you as well, it says nothing about all of the other rubbish that still tracks you but doesn't display ads.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#113It seems like we won't be able to access anything without ads or without fees in future.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#114I use Google Contributor [1], which _effectively_ functions as an ad blocker, one that compensates website owners for the ads they're not displaying. A different, but equivalent, way of looking at the product is that Google Contributor lets me essentially enter a op ad in the advertising auction for any web page I visit; if my bid wins, I see a placeholder instead of the ad. One nice side effect of this scheme is tha…
Me too. Unfortunately, it only is able to block DoubleClick ads, but I agree it makes the web a nicer place, across all devices, without having to deprive websites I go to of revenue.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#115The model I would like to see involves micro-payments. I would be willing to "tip" say $0.10 or $0.15 here and there to instantly unlock certain articles. I think if this were easy to do then wired and other websites like it would make a lot more money over all from it's content. The problem though is that with today's credit card infrastructure the processing fees make this sort of thing unrealistic, and the emergin…
As stated above, Google's Contributor network essentially does this.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since they aren't making any money from your visits to their site anyways I doubt they will be losing a lot of sleep.
That is quite the paradox, isn't it... If they lose significant eyeballs, they can't charge a premium for the ad space. With less premium, they make less money. With less money, they can't write the articles. At least with ad block and non-adblock eyeballs, they could say we get "XXX"k traffic per day/month/year. Less traffic overall will be bad in the long run.
Advertisers don't care (or measure, really) non-ad-viewing users when deciding where to run these campaigns. So you're already not counted.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't a moral argument. This is advertising. Less traffic overall will be bad in the long term. There are no two ways about that.
So true. It is shortsighted to value your readers only for their capacity to view and click advertisements. Readers also act as distribution nodes, sharing content that they find compelling with others who may or may not use ad blockers. Building walls will result in fewer readers, and as you've noted, less traffic will be bad in the long term...
Odd how working for exposure is decried when business owners want designers or devs to do it, but grand when we want publishers to do it.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#118If I was dying to read a Wired article I could just google it. I'm sure there'll be a cached copy somewhere. If that were to fail then I'd just drive a headless browser to the url, or even a bot, and pull the content out. Thankfully, I'm not that desperate to do either. Wired doesn't have as much leverage as they think they do. And frankly, for a technology flagship as they used to be, I'd expect them to work with the community, not against it. Find a bulletproof way to serve malware-free ads and serve them from your domain and I'd gladly whitelist your site. Otherwise I'm not risking it.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#119I'm generally not inclined to fully whitelist anyplace because even if everything it loads today is safe, who's to say what's going to be loaded after the site gets hacked. That said, I tried to go through and do some allowing of requests and scripts for places I recognized, including whitelisting the site in Ghostery to keep it from interfering. After adding 19 separate exceptions in uMatrix for both whole domains a…
It is crazy what kinds of BS you find when you run something like Little Snitch for OSX. On a fresh install of Firefox before I've had a chance to download adblock, there are two dozen popups requesting outbound connections... most of the time, I have NO idea who is behind the request or what these request really want. This is just the start page... news pages are even worse. Run some apps with Little Snitch turned o…
Is there a good open source "Little Snitch" alternative?
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wired is in the business of making money. You don't pay them any money directly, so they make it up by showing you ads. If you're going them to prevent them from making money that way, then they don't give a hoot about your eyeballs.
> so they make it up by showing you ads. Correction: they make it up by giving third parties the ability to lift each and every bit of identifiable information available from your browser, to profile you, to sell your demographic information (lat/lon/approximate age/wealth/family situation/etc, etc) to middlemen who will then in turn sell the opportunity to advertise to you in a real time bidding process to the highe…
Wired doesn't know any of that stuff about you. Facebook and Google might which is why they have strong privacy policies and opt out procedures.