231–240 of 390 posts
I wish more places would do this. I subscribe to several news outlets, and none of them provide this option, even for paying customers. It's ridiculous.
Unfortunately for Wired, their content just isn't good enough to warrant the $52/year price point.
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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.
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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).
Personally, I do not block first-party ads (i.e. ad images served from the same domain as the original content). For me, the point of using an adblocker is to reduce attack surface and tracking opportunities. I see, of course, that I'm likely not representing the majority of adblock users.
Wow, a paywall. Did you come up with that idea all by yourself?
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Is there a good open source "Little Snitch" alternative?
Try umatrix, it's available for both firefox and chrome, and allows you to do whitelisting of third party domains for each domain you visit.
Little Snitch is basically a user-friendly general-purpose application Firewall. When a connection hasn't been whitelisted before, it pop up a dialog box allowing you to accept/reject connection to a host/domain/port permanently/temporarily.
uMatrix does not protect you against 'malicious' connections initiated by non-browser applications. Little Snitch does not provide the fine-grained URI-level filtering that uBlock/uMatrix provide.
Edit: if you have a Mac, Little Snitch is well-worth the money. It is very polished, does the job, and the developers are not greedy (I think I purchased an update once after I started using it in 2007 or 2008).
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> 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 are asking to violate your privacy by feeding your personal information to an ad network. If they were clear about the exchange they expected (personal info for articles), then people wouldn't be so harsh on them. It's pretending that their proposition is just seeing a little ad that's misleading to the point of being immoral.
>It's the self righteous behaviour about it that's immoral
I wouldn't call people being upset that wired has made this anti-privacy decision to force people into an all or nothing subscription self-righteous because it's not unfounded. This is a big middle finger to anyone who cares about privacy.
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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?
Disclaimer: I made it.
I enjoy Wired, but the thought of adding yet another subscription to my monthly credit card statement is too great a cognitive load for me to want to make the jump. Also, if you were to subscribe to the dead tree version, you get 6 months of dead tree + digital + a physical object (battery) for $5 that comparing it to $4/mo for digital only feels cheap.
I don't mind paying a small amount for reading the occasional article, but I don't want to manage a ton of new subscriptions.
Suggested Solution:
Now micropayments have never taken off for much the same reason, but what if I funded one general "content publishers" account with the equivalent of that $3.99/mo? When I get to a paywalled/ad-block unfriendly site, I could choose to fund that particular article using a micropayment from my general fund. I would have only one subscription to manage, would feel good about contributing to content I felt was quality, and people would get paid.
Of course, this takes content publisher buy-in, but if they're already in the process of trying new things, how about it? Feels a little similar to the failed Google Contributor project, but with more direct decision making. Can someone go and build a great business out of this for me?
Unfortunately the post fails to address the reasons that their readers USE ad blockers. If only they had gone a LITTLE bit farther in this post and made specific promises in exchange for being whitelisted. Here are the promises that would have convinced me.
- Third party scripts will be kept to under 33% of page weight. (They're at ~50% for this article, and that's with a 1.1MB gif in the content!)
- We will respect "do not track" headers in your browser (or settings on your Wired account) by excluding you from ad- and analytics-related tracking
- If you have enabled "do not track" headers in your browser, we will only serve you anonymous ads
- We may serve you ads based on your browsing behavior at wired.com, but they will always include a short explanation. For example, "because you were interested in XXXX:"
- Our ad placement and content will follow strict limitations (link to a public page of their guidelines), based on the the Adblock "Acceptable Ads" rules (https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads#criteria).
- We will serve all content and ads over HTTPS, from within the wired.com TLD (or include a list of specific sources), so you can trust that it's really coming from us.
Since Wired doesn't offer to address any of the issues that make (technical) people enable an ad blocker, the post is reduced to an ultimatum. They're asking you to make a special exception for Wired, and offering only a stick as incentive. No carrot, no quid pro quo, and no addressing your concerns. And they're doing it on a 3.3MB page with 1.5MB worth of third party ads and tracking code attached.
Giving an ultimatum to 20% of your readership sounds like a stupid business strategy, and I doubt it's what the Wired board had in mind. Perhaps they could learn something from app designers: if something is so objectionable about your Ux that 20% of your user base uses third party alternatives to get at your content, try a little market research to improve that Ux. Just do a cursory investigation into WHAT people find so terrible, and WHY they use the alternative; consider how you might change your Ux to make that unnecessary. This is 20% of your userbase who likes your content so much, they find ways to access it despite a shitty OOTB Ux. It would be a big sacrifice to cut off such a dedicated (and large) group of fans.