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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

#251

Post by kfk »

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…

Do you? You can start with small blogs and take it from there. You can sell subscriptions to different segments (tech, gardening, etc.) so that the % that goes to a small player once things get bigger is meaningful.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#252

Post by anon1385 »

DannyBee wrote: post #93
rosser wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people with morals Nice. You might take a moment to consider that some of us who block ads are more concerned about the morality (read: more or less utter lack thereof) of the a̶d̶v̶e̶r̶t̶i̶s̶e̶r̶s̶ trackers than we are the revenue some arbitrary site may or may not lose from missing our impressions before you start casting stones wildly about like that. I'd probably be very willing to consider whitelisting sites who…

So, clearly, you instead just directly pay the authors/etc when you can, right? Or does that all conveniently fall by the wayside in your crusade?

Of course you think people who block ads are engaged in a "crusade": you work for an advertising company.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#253

Post by WWKong »

socket0 wrote: post #245
WWKong wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a third option, "accept to view ads with the associated ecosystem which includes tracking". How many more options do you want? At that point Wired is happy to lose you as a customer. You have anyway dodged the question on whether you will pay $5. At the end of the day someone has to foot the bill. Allow them to define their user base and serve them. It is a challenging time for publishers.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#254

Post by dexterdog »

kfk wrote: post #251
dexterdog wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you? You can start with small blogs and take it from there. You can sell subscriptions to different segments (tech, gardening, etc.) so that the % that goes to a small player once things get bigger is meaningful.

There is also the 'pyramid' effect you can get by owning signups. If I as a content provider or just a referrer send you in as a paying customer I can get a cut of your monthly without even serving you content.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#255

Post by kiproping »

The best/funniest solution for problems like these is showing cats and dogs with a Nickolas Cage face, instead of ads for those who have ad-blockers. There is a site that uses this technique,(8muses .com NSFW), those images are so distracting you just have to disable ads. It's hilarious.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#256

Post by dexterdog »

ljoshua wrote: post #248
dexterdog wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

I am open to talking to anybody about it. I think I've got the core functions and issues mapped out already as I've been mulling it for years and watching a few people take a swing at it on the wrong plane.

There really is no issue with one person doing 1000 paid hits versus another who only does 10 as that all balances out. Sharing of accounts is one thing, but that's pretty easy to track as you just have to keep an eye on the heavy users.

Feedback is definitely part of the package. Users are kept anonymous to the content providers by default, but there is still some good aggregate data available. Content providers won't need to worry about their demographics nearly as much since they mainly want that to sell advertising which they should no longer have to do.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#257

Post by kfk »

dexterdog wrote: post #254
kfk wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you? You can start with small blogs and take it from there. You can sell subscriptions to different segments (tech, gardening, etc.) so that the % that goes to a small player once things get bigger is meaningful.

There is also the 'pyramid' effect you can get by owning signups. If I as a content provider or just a referrer send you in as a paying customer I can get a cut of your monthly without even serving you content.

And there is also well done advertising. Once you have a big group of people that reads articles on specific topics, I bet companies will want to pay a lot to send them (top quality of course) content that is also promotional in some way.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#258

Post by jamespo »

fourneau wrote: post #73
aaron695 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment doesn't make any sense? Don't view ads. Wired doesn't care about you. You contribute nothing back anyway. So by making it a little harder, at least some of those people with morals will be pushed in the right direction to pay or white list ads for free content.

"Wired doesn't care about you." isn't true at all. Just because a person who is blocking ads may not generate any revenue directly, they may share the article with someone who doesn't block ads. Losing 20% of their audience may have really painful effects on their reader network.

I guess they have estimated the impact on revenue that would cause and realised it's minimal.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#259

Post by runholm »

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…

I tried to allow their ads after reading this article, but they still didn't load because they depend on several trackers (which I still block).

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#260

Post by obsurveyor »

proactivesvcs wrote: post #243
thirdsun wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They should be able to still do this too; presumably they still have an ad department for the dead tree version of things. That means they have the people in place to sell ads and integrate them into their content. Of course, magazine ads don't really fit your "not huge, distracting or obnoxious" requirement but their ad people can evolve too. There's probably even a business in this for websites/companies that don't have dedicated ad departments.
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