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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

#61

Post by aikah »

In France we had something called the Minitel, it was basically internet but the wrong way and centralized, you had to pay more or less depending on which website you would visit (you'd dial 36 14 for free content , 36 15 for paid one ... ), it failed because it was obviously the wrong model but it was quite lucrative for "content providers". The phone company directly handled payement so there was no friction or paywall.

Here is how a terminal looked like :

https://www.element14.com/community/servlet/JiveServlet/show...

I'm not suggesting to go back to that of course, it was dreadful, but it feels like current content providers always try to reinvent the Minitel somehow.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#62

Post by chrismcb »

jordigh wrote: post #32

> We know that there are many reasons for running an ad blocker, from simply wanting a faster, cleaner browsing experience to concerns about security and tracking software Sigh, again, these are just the incidentals of ads. I wish everyone was just completely honest about what ads are for: they are ploys to manipulate viewers into buying things that they did not need until they watched that ad. Ads are not some goodw…

For wired the point is the ad is for them to stay in business. For the company advertising the point of the ad is to sell something. Maybe it is something you want, maybe it is something you don't need,maybe it is showing you need. But this isn't a conspiracy for wired to sell you something you don't need.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#63

Post by Animats »

jacquesm wrote: post #26
mattmaroon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$1 per week doesn't seem like a lot when phrased that way. But when you think about all of the sites your adblocker blocks ads from on a daily basis, if it'd add up a lot of they all charged $1. I'd be ok with not consuming a good bit of content and paying for the small few I like, but I'm not sure that's sustainable. It'll be interesting to watch. Micropayments, however, will never work. The main problem is that the…

Micropayments would allow me to pay $1 for those articles viewed, or maybe even $5. The difference is that this would not require me to do anything else besides viewing the page, just like on the old prestel networks. But there the 'central authority' was the phone company and the whole tracking saga means that if you want to hit a large enough fraction of the ad blocker users that you'll have to take that scenario i…

All the enthusiasm for micropayments is from people who want to collect micropayments. There is little or no consumer demand for the ability to pay them.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#64

Post by alexbecker »

jacquesm wrote: post #50
wsh91 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are ploys to manipulate viewers into buying things that they did not need until they watched that ad. I have to take issue with this, sorry. You may not be fully cognizant of your needs at the time you see an ad, and what if an ad tells you something about what you want rather than what you "need"? And who are you to make that call for anyone other than yourself?

Well, then I have to take issue with this. Who are you to say what the grandparent is cognizant of or not? I for one do definitely not need advertising to tell me what I need, if I need advertising to tell me then I did not need it . > And who are you to make that call for anyone other than yourself? The call was made on behalf of at least on other person, but in fact that suggestion was never made in the first place…

While I generally hate being advertised to, there are certainly times when advertising has shown me things I didn't know existed but wanted to buy as soon as I did. Especially in the case of books.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#65

Post by fencepost »

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 and for types of requests/actions on domains, I still don't see any ads but I do see an ever-increasing list of third-party sites Wired is pulling requests from. Given a choice between throwing up my hands and saying "Fine, f*ckit, do whatever the hell you want" and whitelisting Wired's requests to all of (disqus, optimizely, amazon-adsystem, condenastdigital, demdex, typekit, adobetm, chartbeat, cloudfront, doubleclick, googleadservices, googlesyndication, googletagservices, mediavoice, mookie1, omtrdc, outbrain, parsely, scorecardresearch, yldbt and zqtk) plus whatever others would be pulled in were I actually to whitelist, I guess I'll have to do without Wired.

So far without ever actually loosening things up far enough to see ads that's AT LEAST 21 different top-level domains Wired is pulling from, not counting its own (and yes, I realize it's part of Conde Nast). Most of those top-level domains have at least 2 subdomains being pulled from, sometimes more. My basic reaction to this is that even if I trust Wired and Conde Nast, I don't know that I trust all those other sites like "mookie1," "yldbt," "zqtk" and whatever other obscurely-named domains.

Frankly, were I to see "yldbt" or "zqtk" as a running process or folder name on a system I was working on, I'd immediately rename them and start virus and malware scans.

So I guess my reading of Wired online will suffer much the same fate as my reading of Wired on paper, because while I like seeing occasional items from Wired it's not a daily destination for me, and I'm certainly not coughing up $50+/year for it.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#66

Post by rosser »

aaron695 wrote: post #33
isomorphic wrote: post #4

> So, in the coming weeks, we will restrict access to articles on WIRED.com if you are using an ad blocker. Good luck with that, Wired. The people-who-will-never-pay group will split into two: People who never visit your site again, and people who up the ante in the ad-blocking escalation. While you may think that you don't care about the people-who-will-never-pay group, the latter subgroup will release their improve…

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.

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 worked with advertisers that didn't run tracking programs most of the Three Letter Agencies in the West would kill to access — if they didn't already have behind-the-scenes arrangements with them. But that question is probably pretty moot at this point, isn't it?

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#67

Post by hammock »

tokenadult wrote: post #23

Forbes has been doing this for a while on its website. (Or, at least for a while it has been detecting the ad blocking-software that I have been using for much longer.) I have basically stopped reading Forbes (which maybe was a good idea on other grounds) and have learned to appreciate stories from competing publications. If Wired doesn't want my eyeballs to visit its site, I'll just stop bringing them there.

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"

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#68

Post by jordigh »

chrismcb wrote: post #62
jordigh wrote: post #32

> We know that there are many reasons for running an ad blocker, from simply wanting a faster, cleaner browsing experience to concerns about security and tracking software Sigh, again, these are just the incidentals of ads. I wish everyone was just completely honest about what ads are for: they are ploys to manipulate viewers into buying things that they did not need until they watched that ad. Ads are not some goodw…

For wired the point is the ad is for them to stay in business. For the company advertising the point of the ad is to sell something. Maybe it is something you want, maybe it is something you don't need,maybe it is showing you need. But this isn't a conspiracy for wired to sell you something you don't need.

It's not a conspiracy, but it's so annoying that nobody speaks about the ultimate purpose of ads. Their ultimate purpose is not Wired. Keeping Wired in business is just one more incidental. If our purpose is to keep Wired in business, there are other ways besides ads.

So, let's talk about the ultimate purpose of ads. Do we endorse that purpose or not? That's the conversation I really want to be having.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#70

Post by jbclements »

I geniunely do feel bad for magazines that are trying to figure out how to survive in a world of ad-blockers. I suspect that many hard-working journalists will lose their jobs as magazines like Wired go out of business. I personally subscribe to several newspapers, and I worry about them, too, and what's going to happen to journalism in this country (USA, sorry for my chauvinism).

BUT!

I want to KILL the free internet--that is, the internet that is paid for with slices of my attention and life. I do believe that advertisers are very good at extracting my attention and money, and I genuinely do want to destroy that internet model. What will emerge? I can only cross my fingers.

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