Other comments have mentioned or hinted at this, but I think the only way to reduce the friction of online subscriptions is to "pool" the content a'la spotify or apple music. I would pay some amount per month for an all I can read premium content model just like I pay for music streaming. Having multiple magazines/providers to choose from would be a big draw for me as I am not always interested in the content of one provider. I like Wired and have read their articles on occasion. I even have a subscription to the print version that I got for airline points I couldnt use elsewhere. I cant see any other way for me to make the jump.
How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
281–290 of 390 posts
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#282Earlier 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 pay for WIRED. What's the problem?
Paying for Wired does nothing to ensure you won't be tracked anyway.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#283Now that sites are being more aggressive when detecting ad blockers, but they still want search engines to index the site and so they happily serve content to the crawlers... Would it be possible to write a browser plugin that can let your session masquerade as a robot? Even pay walled sites let Google index their content, that's how they lure unsuspecting chumps to the site. So why couldn't we have a plugin to imita…
Sure, there are browser plugins to override the HTTP user agent header and in my experience impersonating Google Bot works quite well. On the other hand, this tactic runs afoul with sites detecting your UA for browser specific hacks (especially with HTML5 video) or parts of a sites where bots are blocked by policy.
Also the IP ranges of search bots are more or less well known, so it would be trivial for publishers to block this kind of hack, if they wanted.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"
Ad Block Plus is my main ad blocker, but I had better check to see if the conflict is with another Chrome add-on.
Try switching to Adblock Edge, if for no other reason than it doesn't have the whitelist. No idea if Forbes is on the whitelist. However I use ublock now. (Firefox not chrome also, if it makes a difference)
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#285I'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…
Silly me trying to read a news article: https://twitter.com/ColdPie1/status/654350476612272128
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#286I'm using Adblock Plus local proxy on my unrooted Android tablet. I clicked the link and got a completely white page. I copied the link in Google Translate and I could read the page (clicked the button for the original version). I understand that Wired has to pay its staff but it's a uphill battle.
I add that $1 a week is probably out of touch with reality. It assumes that people goes to Wired.com to browse articles at least few times per week. I might be wrong, but people lands there coming from sites like HN or from Google searches. I'm among this group of people. That means that we read a few articles per month, maybe none at all. Paying even as little as $1 for something I might use and maybe not is out of question. Imagine if I'd have to do that for any random web site I land to. Unfortunately for them the very existence of the hyperlink and the zillion of other news outlets makes paywalled site an as sustainable business as paid web browsers.
Still, if I could pay on demand, 1 cent per article, I'll consider it. Show me an abstract first and remember that I'll remember if your content is really worth that cent. If you think it's tiny, divide the price of a paper newpaper by the number of articles it's made of and we get to that order of magnitude.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#287I actually think this is a reasonable move for them. They have to pay their staff and keep the lights on while producing their content. It is kind of entitled and ridiculous for readers to think the party of well-researched, well-written and insightful content for free could go on forever. You either should have to pay for it explicitly with a subscription fee, or consent to ads and tracking. Yes, there is a lot of m…
I don't think most people have a problem with the concept of ads, after all, every print magazine is filled with them.
The problem is that ads on the web have become more and more obnoxious as click through rates have fallen. The ads have dramatically reduced the usability of some sites, and that's before you get into the issue of tracking and malware.
Had Wired curated their ads to ensure that no full screen popups and other annoying dreck never got onto their site, they might not have a problem. But even then, so many other sites are filled with terrible ads that users would keep using ad blockers anyway.
Maybe their plan will work, maybe it won't. Seems to me that they're going to have to be a little more clever about this than just charging people $52 a year for Wired.com. Maybe they're counting on a very small percentage of "whales" to make it worthwhile but I think the vast majority of people using ad blockers doesn't get enough value out of Wired.com to subscribe, especially considering that it is 2 to 5 times as expensive as the print/tablet subscription.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#288Desperate 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…
spot on. i wrote and gave them feedback saying i was happy to show their ads, but i do not consent to being tracked. their ads are only blocked because privacy badger blocks them due to tracking. no tracking, ads are shown.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#289Time 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.
Methods of both parties will evolve, but ultimately as long as the user has control over his computer(no hardware DRM), he can display whatever he wants.
Here's a nice project idea. Visit a page using multiple cookies, then run OCR on it to extract the texts from each visit. Then compare the texts, extracting only the parts which are equal across visits. This should get rid of targeted ads and ads which vary on each visit. For the remaining ads, use a spam filter, or use a crowd-sourced database of ads.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#290As 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…
One of the Pirate Bay co-founders launched www.flattr.com long ago - they're still around, but I don't know if they're gaining any real traction.