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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

#171

Post by CaptSpify »

hammock wrote: post #67
tokenadult wrote: post #23

Forbes has been doing this for a while on its website. (Or, at least for a while it has been detecting the ad blocking-software that I have been using for much longer.) I have basically stopped reading Forbes (which maybe was a good idea on other grounds) and have learned to appreciate stories from competing publications. If Wired doesn't want my eyeballs to visit its site, I'll just stop bringing them there.

What adblocker are you using? I've tried a couple and have had no issues viewing Forbes. Just have to click past the "quote of the day"

not OP, but I also run noscript, which I think is the culprit for me.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#172

Post by CaptSpify »

franciscop wrote: post #165

Let me take another view on this. Adblocking is on the rise according to, basically, everywhere. I've installed it recently in my family computers since it'll protect them from many nasty stuff besides the ads. However, they are surely not able to add any site to the whitelist (they just know they don't get advertising). Furthermore, with population aging, I think that for the next 10-30 this will make the adoption e…

"essentially all of the ad supported sites I visit are diversions" - https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/AdSupportedWebD...

I would miss a lot of the sites that would end up disappearing, but in the end, I arguably would be better without them anyway. I hope they get to stay, and we find a solution, but if they don't.... shrug

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#173

Post by CaptSpify »

ariwilson wrote: post #120
jacquesm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Wired may or may not, I don't know. But they are the facilitator for this info. Also, Facebook and Google may have "opt out" procedures, but they've been... less than trustworthy with those in the past, and I simply don't trust them.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#174

Post by iSnow »

oska wrote: post #157
ufmace wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That seems like the worst of all worlds. Mining on a desktop computer just barely works, but I'll be damned if I want my laptop's fan to spin up all the time just so I can tip some web site. And I absolutely don't want my mobile to die on me daily because the bitcoin mining drains the battery. And considering the current BTC price, I'd burn like $3 for every $1 gained.

Someone come up with a service where you push money to (so any security breach is limited to the $20 or whatever you keep there) and then have a browser plugin that reacts to a payment challenge (either HTTP 402 or some meta-tag) and presents me with a native chrome button that can't be spoofed by site JS. And add a whitelisting option for something like The Guardian where I currently pay a monthly fee.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#175

Post by lagadu »

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 there's more to success than simply the amount of people who click on your ads. They say 20% of their readers block ads, I would say that it's fair to assume that of those 20% maybe 5% would be willing to pay over $50 a year for reading their content or whitelist them, probably a smaller percentage of users will simply update their adblocking mechanism to keep browsing unbothered. Everyone else of those will simply stop visiting them. That's a possible 15% traffic drop.

It may not be traffic that gave them money directly like you pointed out but it's traffic from a fairly active crowd in social media, it's the people who link articles to them on places like our own HN, Twitter, /. or any number of other places. This effect leads to a drop in number of visitors who see ads which is a revenue drop.

I do like the subscription model (I'd like it better if it was a Freemium subscription model but alas it isn't), but I agree with the OP in believing that they'll backpedal this change before the end of the year.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#176

Post by TheLogothete »

jordigh wrote: post #68
chrismcb wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For wired the point is the ad is for them to stay in business. For the company advertising the point of the ad is to sell something. Maybe it is something you want, maybe it is something you don't need,maybe it is showing you need. But this isn't a conspiracy for wired to sell you something you don't need.

It's not a conspiracy, but it's so annoying that nobody speaks about the ultimate purpose of ads. Their ultimate purpose is not Wired. Keeping Wired in business is just one more incidental. If our purpose is to keep Wired in business, there are other ways besides ads. So, let's talk about the ultimate purpose of ads. Do we endorse that purpose or not? That's the conversation I really want to be having.

No, it's not an incident. It's symbiosis. You know, the thing that we do in order to survive? Nobody cares what you think about WIRED or ads or whatever. We have to make compromises with things that we don't completely agree with and accept that it is our problem and we have to find a way to deal with it ourselves. Because NOBODY else cares. I know it must be hard for a special little snowflake like you to grasp that, but trust me, nobody cares what you think. Nobody will. Advertising is here and it will stay despite what you think. In fact, it will get bigger and bigger and it will play an ever increasing role in our society. We have to find a way to deal with it, acceptable by both parties. And this path does not start with spreading FUD with your self righteous anti-advertising propaganda to whoever will listen to you.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#177

Post by nulltype »

mattmaroon wrote: post #101
jacquesm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Micropayments would allow me to pay $1 for those articles viewed, or maybe even $5. The difference is that this would not require me to do anything else besides viewing the page, just like on the old prestel networks. But there the 'central authority' was the phone company and the whole tracking saga means that if you want to hit a large enough fraction of the ad blocker users that you'll have to take that scenario i…

I'm not saying it wouldn't benefit anyone. Just that the friction of paying for anything at all, assuming a reasonable level of security, is such that if I'm willing to pay $.01 I'm probably willing to pay $1. If I'm willing to pay $1 I'm more than 20% likely to be willing to pay $5. So the optimal pricing strategy would never be a micropayment. This is why there's nothing funded by micropayments. (Unless you count f…

The most successful micropayment service of can think of is probably Spotify. It doesn't look how everyone was imagining micropayments but is effectively the same thing.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#178

Post by oska »

iSnow wrote: post #174
oska wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That seems like the worst of all worlds. Mining on a desktop computer just barely works, but I'll be damned if I want my laptop's fan to spin up all the time just so I can tip some web site. And I absolutely don't want my mobile to die on me daily because the bitcoin mining drains the battery. And considering the current BTC price, I'd burn like $3 for every $1 gained. Someone come up with a service where you push mo…

> Mining on a desktop computer just barely works

You would not be mining on a computer's CPU (or GPU). You would be mining on a dedicated ASIC chip (that is already in production).

> And I absolutely don't want my mobile to die on me daily because the bitcoin mining drains the battery.

Which I why I specified in my comment that you could limit the mining chip to running only when the device is plugged into the wall (e.g. when you charge the battery overnight).

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#179

Post by SCdF »

> here at WIRED, where we do all we can to write vital stories

I genuinely read "viral stories" the first time I read that sentence, and thought to myself: that's awfully honest of them.

Speaking more seriously, I'll repeat what I've said before: I have only started blocking ads in the past 6 months or so, because while in the past I would simply not visit websites with obnoxious advertisements, there is now nowhere to go.

And I understand that you need money to pay your staff, and I understand that the public is not paying you, so someone has to, so that naturally falls to advertisers, as it has done for a hundred years. But clearly the public isn't going to let you do that, at least not traditionally.

So I don't know where this is going to end up, but no where good I imagine. More paid promotions, more "native" advertising, more catering to people who haven't worked out how to use ad block, more viral "you'll never guess who farted in the senate" style non-content-- the top two articles right now on Wired are literally reporting about advertisements. There is advertising sponsoring them writing about advertisements. My head is spinning.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#180

Post by afandian »

mkriss wrote: post #119
monkmartinez wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not exactly the same, but Privacy Badger from EFF is great.
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