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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

#71

Post by jacquesm »

rsuelzer wrote: post #52
jacquesm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which has to be more money than they would possibly make off of the advertising revenue I would generate in a lifetime. You are so terribly wrong about that.

Any links to research on how much advertising dollars the average website makes per unique visitor would be interesting to read.

Prime properties such as wired make really good money on their visitors. The 'average website' makes rather a lot less than that (hence the existence of supply side optimizers).

The online version of the media kit for the wired property:

http://www.condenast.com/brands/wired/media-kit/web

No rates quoted but:

http://adage.com/article/media/digital-cracks-50-ad-revenue-...

Lists the ad revenues at 50% of the total (online + print), that was 2013.

Last year:

http://digiday.com/publishers/two-thirds-wireds-revenue-digi...

So you can see why they're panicking, adblockers are taking a significant bite out of their revenues.

And then there is the print side: (~115K for a full page ad in the print magazine).

http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/2015_WIRED_M...

Is a good primer into how a print/online property such as wired profiles itself to advertisers.

Still trying to find an actual CPM / CPC rate for wired but no luck so far, but

http://monetizepros.com/display-advertising/average-cpm-rate...

Has premium display sitting at about $10 CPM and that's not a bad number compared to what I know about this field, the actual rate for a property such as wired would be a little higher than that (-15% agency fees), but not by much so that's a good starting point.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#72

Post by monkmartinez »

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…

It is crazy what kinds of BS you find when you run something like Little Snitch for OSX. On a fresh install of Firefox before I've had a chance to download adblock, there are two dozen popups requesting outbound connections... most of the time, I have NO idea who is behind the request or what these request really want. This is just the start page... news pages are even worse.

Run some apps with Little Snitch turned on and you see the same thing. Tons of outbound requests to domains that I have never heard of and have no idea what they want on my machine.

I just block everything with reckless abandon. I don't give a shit if my "experience" is degraded.

Frankly, with small kids in the house who I would like to protect to the extent I am able... I am considering installing Pi Hole and whatever else I can find in addition to the spartan whitelist I've set up for them to use via parental controls.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#73

Post by fourneau »

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.

"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.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#74

Post by lstamour »

Lazare wrote: post #21
runako wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wired kind of agrees: if you subscribe to the print edition (~12/yr IIRC), you get access to the digital editions too. The $1/week is a ridiculous grab from people who are unaware that there is a cheaper option available.

Yep: https://subscribe.wired.com/subscribe/wired/ Something squirrelly in the pricing tiers.

Indeed. You can subscribe to digital-only Wired for $19.99 anywhere in the world, and in the US it includes a print copy too.

I'd consider a $1/week if it covered all Conde Nast publications, or a significant portion of the internet. By that logic, though, I'd prefer if a subscription to Texture (Next Issue) or other content services included free access to the affiliated websites without ads. It adds up quick, but even the weekly version works out to $3.46/week for basically every magazine I'd care to read...

Of course ... I'm just saying this. I actually don't read magazines. But I'd pay for a subscription, especially if I could share it with family.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#75

Post by melted »

foreigner wrote: post #28
melted wrote: post #3

Earlier 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.

Perhaps something like Google Contributor.

It's completely unlike Google Contributor. Google Contributor keeps Google in the loop and only removes _Google_ ads if you win an auction. All other ads keep shitting all over your page. This would let you disable _all_ ads, yet still pay the publisher.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#76

Post by throwaway2048 »

rosser wrote: post #66
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.

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…

I prefer the term "online surveillance industry"

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#77

Post by jacquesm »

monkmartinez wrote: post #48
paradox95 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since they aren't making any money from your visits to their site anyways I doubt they will be losing a lot of sleep.

That is quite the paradox, isn't it... If they lose significant eyeballs, they can't charge a premium for the ad space. With less premium, they make less money. With less money, they can't write the articles. At least with ad block and non-adblock eyeballs, they could say we get "XXX"k traffic per day/month/year. Less traffic overall will be bad in the long run.

I hope you did not think that the advertisers aren't capable of running a little estimation program on all those clicks going 'in' to wired that did not result in the displaying of an ad tag?

If there is any party that is aware of how many people on wired's web property are running an ad blocker it is the advertising networks.

Wired is not telling them that they get 'XXX'k traffic per time unit, they're being told what their traffic is and what percentage of them has an ad blocker installed.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#78

Post by Donzo »

monkmartinez wrote: post #51
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.

This isn't a moral argument. This is advertising. Less traffic overall will be bad in the long term. There are no two ways about that.

So true.

It is shortsighted to value your readers only for their capacity to view and click advertisements.

Readers also act as distribution nodes, sharing content that they find compelling with others who may or may not use ad blockers.

Building walls will result in fewer readers, and as you've noted, less traffic will be bad in the long term...

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#79

Post by njharman »

msoad wrote: post #9

I wonder why content website don't use Canvas rendering in order to block all ad-blockers. You either see the canvas, with ads in it or don't see anything at all. There need to be a compatible ad-network as well. Accessibility is going to be an issue but if you can solve all of that there is a startup idea right there!

There is more value in tracking, web bugs, etc. then actually showing you the ad.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#80

Post by vinceguidry »

Oh well, there goes another outlet. They can all do this, I don't care. Just won't read their content. Eventually there won't be any good non-paywalled content left, and I'll just figure something else out.

They want my money, they're going to have to either pay off the mob (Adblock Plus) or get together with all the other news outlets and give me a one stop shop option.

No way am I going to manage dozens of $1 a week subscriptions, logins, and such just to read articles linked to by Hacker News. Your content just isn't that important to me, sorry.

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