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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

#241

Post by Freak_NL »

thirdsun wrote: post #223
chrischen wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But most people who block ads just don't want to see ads. Your technical concerns are in the minority.

I think they just don't want to see ads as intrusive as the ones found these days. Neither do I. While my main concerns are performance, bandwidth, security and privacy, I don't think that simple static image ads would have led to the widespread adoption of ad blockers we're currently seeing. In my opinion it's due to the fact that ads became very intrusive lately - video, audio, flash, popups, fullscreen overlays, e…

Absolutely. The number of people who would still resort to blocking ads if they were non-targeted, static, tastefully done yet clearly recognizable as advertisements, served locally, non-tracking, and non-obtrusive would probably have been negligible. But now there is an entire economy that depends on advertisements that track you and know you and need to be served via third party brokers, because if they didn't they wouldn't sell.

I don't know the solution to fix this mess, but I will gladly help pop the current bubble so something more useful can replace it.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#242

Post by dexterdog »

nefitty wrote: post #156
elorant wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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.

I've been working on the idea for a similar system for years. The barrier to entry it mammoth.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#243

Post by proactivesvcs »

thirdsun wrote: post #154
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 w…

Simple static ads that are not huge, distracting or obnoxious, that are delivered free of any script or similar code, and all hosted by the first party. Those are the ads I would probably find acceptable.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#244

Post by amelius »

Time for adblockers to become smarter. IMHO, an adblocker should keep a shadow DOM, so that the originating site cannot see which DOM elements have been removed/altered. Also, an adblocker could use a "refresh cookie" strategy, to effectively disable tracking.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#245

Post by socket0 »

WWKong wrote: post #227
socket0 wrote: post #216

"Trust us, and everyone connected to us, and everyone connected to them."" Wired is asking its readership to compromise, without being willing to make any compromises themselves. They're asking us to trust them on a one-to-one basis, but that's now how trust works in a network. We have to trust Wired, and trust every single one of the companies or servers they include content and scripting from, and trust every singl…

Are you sure Wired is not compromising? Maybe they want to charge $5 but only charging $1. Will you pay a much higher price for all the things you suggest Wired should do?

Charging one dollar instead of five isn't compromising, that's haggling. I don't think anyone could begrudge them charging money, it's just that they don't give their technically savvy audience a real choice. It's either pay up, or go read something else.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#246

Post by dexterdog »

ljoshua wrote: post #238

As has been mentioned elsewhere, my exact problem with this/Forbes approach/elsewhere is that there is no way that I want to suddenly start managing several new monthly subscriptions for all these outlets. 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 v…

Why wouldn't you make it invisible? Do people really want to decide to pay or not pay for each page hit? You have a monthly fund which is your subscription. When you hit a site that is in the network it gets a chit against your account. At the end of the month (or whatever) your chits are counted up and providers get credited. It's really pretty simple and invisible. People get to fund what they actually use. Content creators get paid. Content providers can decide whether to paywall for out-of-network requests if they like. There is a paper trail to deal with copyright violations. I just need a huge pile of money to get people to sell it to some key players.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#247

Post by vanderZwan »

ljoshua wrote: post #238

As has been mentioned elsewhere, my exact problem with this/Forbes approach/elsewhere is that there is no way that I want to suddenly start managing several new monthly subscriptions for all these outlets. 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 v…

In the Netherlands and Germany, there's Blendle, and it's very successful.

http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Blendle

https://medium.com/on-blendle

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#248

Post by ljoshua »

dexterdog wrote: post #246
ljoshua wrote: post #238

As has been mentioned elsewhere, my exact problem with this/Forbes approach/elsewhere is that there is no way that I want to suddenly start managing several new monthly subscriptions for all these outlets. 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 v…

Why wouldn't you make it invisible? Do people really want to decide to pay or not pay for each page hit? You have a monthly fund which is your subscription. When you hit a site that is in the network it gets a chit against your account. At the end of the month (or whatever) your chits are counted up and providers get credited. It's really pretty simple and invisible. People get to fund what they actually use. Content…

That could work as well. Some sort of normalization would need to occur such that someone visiting 1,000 sites on a $5/mo budget would compare favorably against someone visiting 10 on the same budget. But that would certainly further reduce inaction.

I think some sort of feedback would be important, at least in the beginning, so that people understand how this magic pile of money is being treated.

Who wants to give dexterdog a ton of money to go do this? :)

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#249

Post by alkonaut »

Again: just serve ads and I'm happy even if it's half the content on the page. Just don't use tracking ads from ad networks. I don't mind downloading huge ads and I don't mind the layout including the ads (as long as they are tasteful, as in the print version of Wired).

Wired is a print mag. They have always struck deals with advertisers to show dumb ads without impression counts, in their magazine. Just put those ads on the site!

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#250

Post by ljoshua »

vanderZwan wrote: post #247
ljoshua wrote: post #238

As has been mentioned elsewhere, my exact problem with this/Forbes approach/elsewhere is that there is no way that I want to suddenly start managing several new monthly subscriptions for all these outlets. 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 v…

In the Netherlands and Germany, there's Blendle, and it's very successful. http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Blendle https://medium.com/on-blendle

Ah, very nice. The pricing is higher than I would have expected (€0.25/avg), though I wonder what ends up being sustainable.
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