Dear Wired: just sell ads and place them on your page. I'll have no problem with them. Don't have services track me as I view them. Don't have companies correlate my viewing of them with more data about me and then sell that data to yet more companies. It's simple really.
How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
381–390 of 390 posts
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't support people not giving their work away for free? I could understand the privacy argument but "some people can't afford that businesses product so fuck that business" seems ridiculous.
Gee, people want to feed their kids? FUCK THEM. Stuff it, greedy capitalist pigs.
Please don't do this here.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Texture is an attempt to be that. Like Netflix they don't have everything you could ever want. But they have enough.
But the question is: are those magazines themselves stripped of all ads? Or do I pay for the magazines, and then find out they're 50% ads?
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
But it's still micropayments. They've done a good job of aggregating some quality content, but it's still pay per click to the consumer.
... with a one-click refund if you don't like the article. In regular use, you don't go through the process of paying - opening an article automatically pays the price, so it's very easy to do. However, you can always get a refund. It's a tiny detail, but it changes the whole flow. A nice side-effect is that clickbait is punished very harshly by the customers.
The one-click refund isn't available after like 10 tries.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
But most people who block ads just don't want to see ads. Your technical concerns are in the minority.
If you put a static ad image hosted on your own server on the page, something like http://wired.com/img/jhfkfhfuhi34cn2.jpg , ad blocker will not be able to distinguish it from other images and won't block it. There is also common banner dimensions that get blocked, but it is easy to defeat by adding a pixel somewhere that fits into site design. Problem with this approach is that you can't just slap some random ad ne…
It's amazing why they don't just do this. Part of the reason why is that ad blocking is so easy, so most people will just do it... especially if it has the added benefit of removing the 5 second delay on YouTube videos due to ads.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always thought of micropayments as being like 1cent or less, like a small enough amount to be forgettable for even the stingiest people. And to somehow make it effortlessly simple to pay, so it's closer to an impulse purchase. There's a lot of friction associated with finding a credit card and punching in numbers and an address. I'm already using Google Contributor, and have apparently effectively paid amounts from…
21.co is targeting micropayments [1] (and many other things) in a novel way. You will have a low powered bitcoin mining chip built into your device. This chip basically turns electricity into very small amounts of bitcoin (you'll be able to specify to do this only when your device is plugged into the wall, so as to not drain the battery). The chip's mining efficiency is less than state of the art bitcoin mining farms…
Besides it being utterly ridiculous to have a mining chip in your computer, you are ignoring that Bitcoin is terrible for micropayments.
1) The blockchain can handle approximately 3 transactions per second, which if actually spread evenly across the day (which they wouldn't be), it can handle around 260,000 transactions per day. A website like the New York Times does over 1MM unique per day.
2) In order to get settlements on your transactions, you have to pay a fee or else miners will ignore you. Current fees are around the equivalent of $0.04 USD. So your 1 cent transaction will not only bound up the network, but also cost you 5 cents to actually get processed.
Bitcoin is not now, nor will it ever be, a feasible solution for micropayments. And the ridiculous 21.co mining rig is even more ridiculous of a solution.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
... with a one-click refund if you don't like the article. In regular use, you don't go through the process of paying - opening an article automatically pays the price, so it's very easy to do. However, you can always get a refund. It's a tiny detail, but it changes the whole flow. A nice side-effect is that clickbait is punished very harshly by the customers.
The one-click refund isn't available after like 10 tries.
You don't see this?
http://i.imgur.com/5vYGsUg.png
(turns out you have two more clicks: there's one "please tell us why, for statistical purposes" multiple choice question followed by a confirmation - I think that's fair since it will greatly reduce abuse.)
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Part of the challenge for publishers lies in deciding what they really are. Following a quantity over quality model might work well for many. On the other hand, Wired (as distinct from Condé Nast) have traditionally had a different kind of relationship with their readers. There's an emotional bond between many in the tech community and the Wired brand, which calls for a higher level of trust, but at the same time delivers a much more loyal type of readership.
I would probably not pay for access to Wired without advertising, regardless the price. I am more than willing to pay for services, or access to information that I can rationalise as an investment, but (apparently like many others) not for entertainment. On the other hand, I'm more than willing to disable ad blockers on wired.com, as long as I know everything include is served from their own network, and that they take my security as seriously as I do. Some friends can be trusted with unsupervised access to your home, but those are special friends. Wired have to convince us they're a special friend.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wireshark or even tcpdump will get you most of the way there, I think.
Little Snitch doesn't just show you traffic, but also allows to block requests per domain per application.
Then add iptables to that list and I think you're set :-) seriously, all due respect to Little Snitch - I've heard a lot of good things about it and I'm sure it's much easier to use than the raw tools. But I doubt it's doing anything that can't be done with tcpdump/iptables.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#390I'm fine with some people using Ad-block because they don't like ads. But, when it's automatically installed on masses of computers, it starts to really become a problem.
This will only create a fractured Internet and make it difficult for small startups to survive.