Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 390 posts

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#21

Post by Lazare »

runako wrote: post #13
mark_l_watson wrote: post #2

I 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.

Yep: https://subscribe.wired.com/subscribe/wired/

Something squirrelly in the pricing tiers.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#22

Post by jacquesm »

msoad wrote: post #9

I 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!

It's interesting that you hit on this solution which most likely has been debated in many a boardroom of companies that see these ad blocker figures ever on the rise.

The problem is that this 'solution' is not really a solution. It degrades the web to a fraction of its original use case and it would indicate a drastic departure from the open standards that got us here in the first place.

In a war - if you want to end it - the idea is to de-escalate. A reasonable first step from a property such as wired would be to demand from their ad-tech providers that they get rid of any tracking code and other trickery in their ad tags and that the ads served would be simple imagery rather than flash and/or javascript ads that leak an enormous pile of sensitive data about you to the 'supply side platforms'.

But since that would go hand-in-hand with a reduction in effectiveness they would then have to de-rate their ad prices or they would have to live with less income. It appears that wired would rather self destruct or at a minimum force users to convert directly at rate card prices (a win for them if they do in signfificant numbers) rather than go down this route. Time will tell if it is the winning move.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#23

Post by tokenadult »

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.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#24

Post by fiatmoney »

jacquesm wrote: post #15
fiatmoney wrote: post #11

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.

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 t…

Presumably they get desperate, then.

Look, it's easy to wave your hands and talk about viral articles, but fundamentally they will do what they need to in order to stay alive, or be replaced by a company that will. You can have micropayments (failed experiment), subscriptions, or ads. Empirically it seems like ads or other non-monetary consideration (influence, sponsored content, etc) has outcompeted subscription-based models for most content. Given that the "war" is entirely technical & visible to the end user only by the presence or absence of ads, the question is just whether you'll read a publication that has ads, or not. Empirically, the general population will.

(This says nothing about how invasive the ads are).

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#25

Post by alienasa »

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.

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.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#26

Post by jacquesm »

mattmaroon wrote: post #18
jacquesm wrote: post #8

Desperate 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…

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 into account.

Wired figures that if you read any of their content at all you owe them $50 / year and that's an 'all you can eat' figure. So if you read all the articles they have that's a bargain, if you read only one then you might as well skip that one and the next and take your s.o. out for dinner.

A micropayment system would reduce the need for such calculations, it would allow a pay-as-you-go model which is far more effective for impulse buys such as articles.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#27

Post by jacquesm »

adt2bt wrote: post #19
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…

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.

They may very well be in for a rude surprise. You can bet they will roll this out with a big name writer's article (Neal Stephenson has written for wired before, that would be a good candidate) to maximize the conversion. If they start it out with a bunch of junk they'll effectively tell people 'save your money'.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#28

Post by foreigner »

melted wrote: post #3
mark_l_watson wrote: post #2

I 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.

Perhaps something like Google Contributor.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#30

Post by jacquesm »

fiatmoney wrote: post #16
VeilEm wrote: post #5

How 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.

This might happen. But I can tell you there will be some very vocal opposition to this (users of screen readers for instance, and anybody living in a country with accessibility laws will be very happy to give you merry hell).
Post reply on HN