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How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

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Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#151

Post by michaelmrose »

x0x0 wrote: post #117
Donzo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exposure IS worth something and a business that pays a team of analysts and other professionals ought to be in a position to access this and decide accordingly. In this case in the long run something is better than nothing which is what wired will end up with.

As a publication they have little to offer to justify their high subscription cost and the portion of people interested in tech who don't use an ad blocker will eventually be the empty set.

Alternatively they could offer tasteful text and image ads served from their own domain and many people would be willing to allow them.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#152

Post by danneu »

viraptor wrote: post #103
Animats wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the enthusiasm for micropayments is from people who want to collect micropayments. There is little or no consumer demand for the ability to pay them.

You'd think so... I signed up for flattr ( https://flattr.com/ ) with some credit shortly after they launched. Over half a year, I found one website ( https://lightspark.github.io/ ) I went to which wanted to receive my money (and they did). Everybody else served ads (which I blocked). Hell, putting a bitcoin address on my blog gave me actual couple of cents. :)

Clicking on a Gittip/Flattr/Patreon badge or looking up a donation Bitcoin address are always worth a sad chuckle.

That you've given out a whole schmeckle in a year isn't much of a counterpoint.

It's like when someone would tip you $0.002 on Reddit back when people still used CoinTip: insult for the receiver while making the giver feel like they made a difference -- altogether a net negative for the world.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#153

Post by mirkules »

johnnyfaehell wrote: post #147
incepted wrote: post #142

Prediction: in a few days/weeks, Wired will back pedal on this decision under the pretense that they are listening to the feedback of angry users, while the reality will be that they have been hemorrhaging readership because of the decision and reverting it is the only way to try to salvage the mess they created.

Why is losing readers who make you no money a bad thing? It lowers their hosting costs therefore it actually makes them money. People who don't use adblock, whitelist, pay the fee for ad free all make wired money and will continue to read it.

Because ad tracking is all about reach. I use ad-blocking, but maybe 80% of my Facebook friends or Twitter followers don't. When I share an article, there are potentially 80% of my acquaintances who would see ads. If I never share it because I couldn't read it, there is zero potential.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#154

Post by thirdsun »

fencepost wrote: post #65

I'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…

Agreed. I think Wired, as well as other publishers, are missing the point here. I don't have any issue with ads in general - but if we're talking about ads that Wired has no control over and just fetches from a network, it's a whole different story. The same applies to ads that significantly increase page load times, bandwidth usage (I'm forced to use a metered LTE connection) or privacy concerns.

Simple static ads would render most of these concerns unnecessary, but I doubt there's any incentive to go back to that kind of "outdated" advertising.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#155

Post by mirimir »

elorant wrote: post #123
isomorphic wrote: post #4

> 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…

$52 is way too much for a medium that occasionally publishes something good. OK, that’s just my opinion and it’s highly subjective. But I used to love Wired back in the days when Internet was booming. Nowadays they’re just too irrelevant. All that aside, I’d love a pay-per-article scheme. Give me a summary of the article and if I like it I can pay for it. Sounds much more reasonable than asking me to pay for everythi…

Right. I don't read $1 worth of Wired per week. That page I just read was worth maybe $0.001 (and that's being generous). Generally, I'd be happy to match forgone ad income. I wonder how many page views it takes for Wired to earn $1.

Edit: Make that $0.01 for the page.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#156

Post by nefitty »

elorant wrote: post #123
isomorphic wrote: post #4

> 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…

$52 is way too much for a medium that occasionally publishes something good. OK, that’s just my opinion and it’s highly subjective. But I used to love Wired back in the days when Internet was booming. Nowadays they’re just too irrelevant. All that aside, I’d love a pay-per-article scheme. Give me a summary of the article and if I like it I can pay for it. Sounds much more reasonable than asking me to pay for everythi…

I'd love to see a widespread adoption of micro payment schemes. It looks like BT could make that quite easy to do. I don't know the technical aspects of what a system like that would entail, but it could unlock gated articles, serve as a voluntary tip jar, or even a system where a preset amount of tokens/coins get distributed evenly across the participating sites a user visits.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#157

Post by oska »

ufmace wrote: post #44
mattmaroon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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…

I always thought of micropayments as being like 1cent or less, like a small enough amount to be forgettable for even the stingiest people. And to somehow make it effortlessly simple to pay, so it's closer to an impulse purchase. There's a lot of friction associated with finding a credit card and punching in numbers and an address. I'm already using Google Contributor, and have apparently effectively paid amounts from…

21.co is targeting micropayments [1] (and many other things) in a novel way.

You will have a low powered bitcoin mining chip built into your device. This chip basically turns electricity into very small amounts of bitcoin (you'll be able to specify to do this only when your device is plugged into the wall, so as to not drain the battery). The chip's mining efficiency is less than state of the art bitcoin mining farms, but for the small amounts you are mining that really doesn't matter. The benefit is having (a small amount of) money put onto your device without you having to make any effort at all and replenished over time. There will also be the ability to specify a threshold below which money can be transferred from your device to a website without your authorisation. So you might specify 1 cent a webpage (for a collection of high quality sites) that you're happy to pay without constantly having to press an “ok” button.

This will then deliver a very low effort system for micro-paying websites requiring very little need for attention and management from the user, effectively automatically paying websites with device-generated digital currency rather than with attention/exposure to ads.

[1] https://21.co/learn/21-micropayments/#how-21-micropayments-w...

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#158

Post by digbyloftus »

funkysquid wrote: post #69

I don't use an ad blocker, but I'm thinking of installing one just for wired, if only to see how they implement this. And because I don't support hiding content from people who don't want to pay with their eyeballs and privacy, or maybe can't pay with money.

You don't support people not giving their work away for free? I could understand the privacy argument but "some people can't afford that businesses product so fuck that business" seems ridiculous.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#159

Post by bambax »

fencepost wrote: post #65

I'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…

The reason blocking is so easy and works so well is because everyone got lazy.

Publishers want ads but don't want to actually do the job of selling them; ads used to be free money, and this is coming to an end.

Ads from their own domain would be a little harder to block, especially because blocking would have to be done on a page-by-page basis (or at least, website-by-website).

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#160

Post by mirimir »

aaron695 wrote: post #124
jacquesm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some of those people with morals As opposed to those without morals who won't white list the trackers or pay up? As opposed to those moral upstanding citizens that run the advertising industry? I don't think that the 'morals' bit needs to be in there, in fact it would be stronger without.

They are asking, please stop using our content without giving something back. We need something from you to continue. Here are two options. Payment, or ads that we'll try and keep ok. The response is, we'll weaponize and win. Or excuses about how I don't contribute anything but might bring in someone who does, so how dare you. You are going to fail. These are not evidence based arguments. It's not to hard to block Ad…

They could come up with a better payment option. They could accept micropayments of some sort. Even an anonymous deposit-based system. Then they could quote me an ad-auction based price, and give me the option of entering an account number and password.
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